<i>Pfizer was deemed "too big to fail" like that. Why? I have no idea. If the company really did have to close down, it seems likely that others would have picked up the company's various products -- and perhaps done so without putting people's lives at risk.</i><p>Pfizer is the number one drug company by sales in the world, so it seems unlikely to me that not being able to bill Medicare/Medicaid for their products would have shut them down. A more likely scenario was that they dared the prosecutors to indict the parent company and then explain to seniors and poor people why they were suddenly required to pay full freight for Lipitor, Zithromax, Celebrex, etc. Pfizer still owns patents to major, important drugs and it seems unlikely that the government could change that without passing broad legislation or running into constitutional issues. I suspect that the people who run the justice department took a hard look at this situation and decided to let these guys off the hook and spin it as "too big to fail" instead of facing the political consequences of prosecuting aggressively. The law preventing companies from billing government insurance programs looks like more of a bug than a feature at this point because it would give them extra leverage if they decided to play chicken with prosecutors in these cases.