The lawsuit claims there is a conspiracy to inflate prices that consumers pay
of ConsumerAffairsThe state of Texas has filed a lawsuit against drug companies that produce insulin and pharmacy benefit managers (PBM), claiming there is a conspiracy to keep insulin prices high.
The suit claims the defendants including Eli Lilly, Express Scripts and CVS Pharmacy, among others have artificially and willingly raised insulin prices and then paid PBMs to include the insulin products in their standard offerings.
The suit charges the drug companies were granted preferred status even though their insulin prices are higher than other drugs. According to the complaint, these synthetic insulin drugs cost the manufacturers less than $2 to produce and were originally priced at $20 when released in the late 1990s, but now range between $300 and $700.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says the manufacturers named in the lawsuit have increased the prices in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
This is a disturbing conspiracy by which pharmaceutical companies were intentionally and artificially inflating the price of insulin, Paxton said. Big Pharma insulin manufacturers and PBMs worked together to take advantage of diabetes patients and drive prices as high as they could. These companies acted illegally and unethically to enrich themselves, and we will hold them accountable.
The FTC has also filed a lawsuit
The Texas suit follows a similar complaint by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which last month sued the three largest prescription drug benefit managers for allegedly driving up insulin prices through anticompetitive and unfair rebating practices, impaired patients access to lower list price products, and shifted the cost of high insulin list prices to vulnerable patients.
The FTC charged Caremark Rx, Express Scripts (ESI), and OptumRx and their affiliated group purchasing organizations (GPOs) abused their economic power by rigging pharmaceutical supply chain competition in their favor. As a result, the suit says, patients must pay more for life-saving medication.
When we say life-saving medication, thats no exaggeration. According to the American Diabetes Association, diabetes was a virtual death sentence before insulin was discovered in 1921. In 1921, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best figured out how to remove insulin from a dogs pancreas.
The first synthetic human insulin was produced in 1978 using E. coli bacteria to produce it. Eli Lilly went on in 1982 to sell the first commercially available biosynthetic human insulin under the brand name Humulin.
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Posted: 2024-10-04 18:24:57
