AG joins lawsuit to fight for lower drug prices
Published 4:56 pm Friday, May 17, 2019
Special to The Daily News
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry recently joined Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and 42 other attorneys general in a lawsuit against Teva Pharmaceuticals and 19 of the nation’s largest generic drug manufacturers — alleging a broad conspiracy to artificially inflate and manipulate prices, reduce competition, and unreasonably restrain trade for more than 100 different generic drugs.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, also names 15 individual senior executive defendants responsible for sales, marketing, pricing, and operations. The drugs at issue account for billions of dollars of sales in the United States, and the alleged schemes increased prices affecting the health insurance market, taxpayer-funded healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and individuals who must pay artificially inflated prices for their prescriptions drugs.
“Louisiana patients rely on generic drugs every day and they have felt the burn from the alleged conspiracy,” Landry said. “I am proud to join General Tong in these efforts to ensure those who have harmed patients are brought to justice.”
Landry, Tong, and the other AGs allege the drug manufacturers engaged in a broad, coordinated, and systematic campaign to conspire with each other to fix prices, allocate markets, and rig bids for more than 100 different generic drugs. The drugs span all types, including tablets, capsules, suspensions, creams, gels, ointments, and classes, including statins, ace inhibitors, beta blockers, antibiotics, anti-depressants, contraceptives, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and treat a range of diseases and conditions from basic infections to diabetes, cancer, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, HIV, ADHD, and more. In some instances, the coordinated price increases were over 1,000 percent.
Their lawsuit seeks damages, civil penalties, and actions by the court to restore competition to the generic drug market.