• The Korean Society of Law and Medicine
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.3-28
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• 2022

Recently, the targets and clauses of negotiation between 'National Health Insurance Service (NHIS)' and Pharmaceutical companies has been expanded. Due to newly adopted 'Quality management clause', 'Compulsory supply maintenance clause' and 'Penalty for breach of contract clause', not only 'Ministry of Health and Wellfare (MOHW)'s 'drug listing' and 'Price cap' announcement, but also 'negotiation between NHIS and pharmaceutical companies' can be a legal sanction to the suppliers. Once secretary of MOHW order NHIS to negotiate with pharmaceutical company, NHIS notify this order to the company and enter into the negotiation. 'The order' exists in the public domain between the government (MOHW) and public institutions (NHIS) and does not constrain the legal rights of companies (Therefore companies cannot pile a lawsuit about the order). However, 'the notice' or 'negotiation' is an act which has a counterpart, can be a target of administrative litigation if the company get some disadvantages from the talks. Negotiations can be divided into four types according to "the target (whether it is listed on the insurance benefit list)" and "the purpose (whether the target is price or conditional)." In particular, negotiations on listed drugs, whose goal is to set unfavorable conditions for companies, can be illegal if there is no price. So we need to consider compensation for the company as an incentive to negotiate.

• The Korean Society of Law and Medicine
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.149-179
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• 2010

In November 2007, the Korean Constiutional Court held that a joint penal provision in which the individual employer is punished when his or her employee is determined to have committed a crime was unconstitutional, because the joint penal provision had no contents for the culpability of an individual employer and thus violated the constitutionally protected principle of culpability. After the Korean Constitutional Court's judgment, since December 2008 the Ministry of Justice began to change the old joint penal provision into the new revised joint penal provision. On January 2010, the old joint penal provisions of 110 laws were revised. The new revised joint penal provision adds only an additional sentence: "If a juristic person, an entity or an individual perform due care and supervision over its employee for the prevention of such a crime, it will be exempted from the punishment". But an presumption of negligence clause that is added in the new revised joint penal provision is still vacuum in concerned with supervision responsibility. Probably the new form of penal provision, that is understood to be a kind of the presumption of negligence, could let the burden of proof be changed from the public prosecutor to the accused, in other words employer-side. Especially, when joint penal provision is applied to hospital as administrative punishment, according to the hospital is a (juridical) foundation or not, the application of the joint penal provision is different and unfaithful. In my opinion, therefore, a corporation liability could be considered according to various liability of employee's business and the crime its employee committed because of an organizational failure of the corporation.