You've heard of sports teams buying out their coaches' contracts. Well, now there's a device maker considering buying out its deals with surgeons. In a move designed to clear up legal troubles over its contracts with doctors, Zimmer is considering cutting off royalty contracts with many of them. To get out of those long-term deals, the company would give those docs up-front payments. Though Zimmer won't say how much that's likely to cost, analysts estimate the buyouts might run to $250 million.

And that would come on top of a $169.5 million fine levied by the U.S. government last year, plus the $54 million Zimmer expects to spend on new compliance measures, such as disclosing doc payments in an online database.

- read the story [1] in the Financial Times

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Zimmer weeds out doc conflicts [2]