Breaking news that a major pharmaceutical player – Novartis AG – is linked up in the Donald Trump/Michael Cohen paying-off-a-porn-star fiasco took the industry by, well, storm May 8. The merits and legalities of Novartis' decision to pay what appears to be $1.2m to Essential Consulting, a company owned by Trump's attorney Michael Cohen, in 2017 will be debated, but at the end of the day, the payments have a glimmer of paying for access, and the whole affair puts the pharmaceutical industry back in the red when it comes to the balance sheet of public perception.
The payments raise a lot of questions. First and foremost, why would Novartis make these payments and what were they hoping to get in return? On that front, the company isn't saying. They did say they weren't able to get the service they had anticipated related to US health care policy