Tom Harkin: “I will yield myself a couple of minutes. I join with my colleague Senator Enzi in opposition to the Sanders amendment.…”

“I will yield myself a couple of minutes. I join with my colleague Senator Enzi in opposition to the Sanders amendment. We are all disturbed by a lot of what we are reading and these big settlements. I know the recent one a couple of weeks ago on Abbott Labs where part of the prosecution case was actually that this was part of their business model. Then they had to settle it. So this is all very disturbing. However, that cries out more for, perhaps, looking at the criminal charges and perhaps strengthening some of those things but not taking away exclusivity. If you do that, a lot of times you could take away exclusivity from someone who just committed a misdemeanor. A lot of these settlements were misdemeanor charges where no intent was shown. A lot of times, if you did this, you might penalize someone who maybe had done something wrong in the past, and now maybe they have new leadership, a new company, and reformed themselves, and now they have to lose their exclusivity? You would not want to do that. Third, if you do this--I think Senator Enzi pointed this out correctly--if there is no reason to settle, then people are going to go to the wall in terms of defending themselves, and DOJ doesn't have all that kind of personnel and the time to do that. I think we would then have an even worse situation of people committing fraud because then they would know they would not have any reason to settle it whatsoever.…”