Connecticut Attorney General William Tong is leading a 44-state coalition in an antitrust lawsuit against 20 makers of generic drugs and 15 individuals, claiming the companies conspired to fix prices for 114 medications.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, also names 15 individual senior executive defendants at the heart of the conspiracy who were 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.
It includes lawsuit against Aurobindo Pharma, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, Lupin, Wockhardt, Cadila Healthcare (Zydus), and Taro Pharmaceutical Industries (a subsidiary of Sun Pharma). Executives of Lupin, Aurobindo, and Glenmark, too, have been named as accused in the case.
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, which is the world’s largest generic drugmaker, is also accused in this lawsuits. The chargesheet includes 524-pages which contains emails, telephone calls and texts allegedly showing competitors working together to fix prices on the drugs.
"We have hard evidence that shows the generic drug industry perpetrated a multi-billion dollar fraud on the American people. We have emails, text messages, telephone records, and former company insiders that we believe will prove a multi-year conspiracy to fix prices and divide market share for huge numbers of generic drugs. These are drugs that people in this country rely on every day for acute and chronic conditions and diseases from diabetes and cancer to depression and arthritis. We all wonder why our healthcare, and specifically the prices for generic prescription drugs, are so expensive in this country—this is a big reason why. This investigation is still in its early stages. We will not stop until these companies and the individuals who orchestrated these schemes are held accountable," said Attorney General William Tong.
The complaint alleges that Teva, Sandoz, Mylan, Pfizer and 16 other generic 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.
