Alia
Paavola - Monday, May 13th, 2019
Attorneys
general from 44 states are suing the nation's largest generic drugmakers,
claiming they conspired to inflate prices of more than 100 generic drugs by as
much as 1,000 percent, according to The New York Times.
The
lawsuit, filed May 10, claims more than a dozen generic drugmakers, including
Teva Pharmaceuticals, Mylan and subsidiaries of Pfizer and Novartis, were part
of a wide-reaching price-fixing scheme involving generic HIV medications,
asthma treatments, oral antibiotics, blood thinners, cancer drugs,
contraceptives, antidepressants and other drugs.
The
lawsuit also names 15 individual senior executives responsible for sales,
marketing and pricing decisions at their respective organizations.
"We
all know that prescription drugs can be expensive," Gurbir Grewal, the New
Jersey attorney general, told The New York Times. "Now we know
that high drug prices have been driven in part by an illegal conspiracy among generic
drug companies to inflate their prices."
According
to the lawsuit, most of the illegal collusive activity occurred from July 2013
to January 2015. During that time, Teva raised the price of nearly 400
formulations of 112 generic drugs. As part of the scheme, competitors agreed to
cooperate on pricing so each company could maintain a "fair share" of
the drug market and colluded to raise prices on as many drugs as possible, the
suit claims.
While
the complaint paints Teva as the leader in the price-fixing, it describes the
conduct as "pervasive and industrywide."
Teva
has denied the allegations.
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