New Lawsuit Claims Major Drugmakers Conspired to Restrict Cheaper Insulin from Pharmacies
This is an absolute shame.
Under the Trump administration, a regulatory measure known as rule 340b actively sought to bring drugs to rural health providers at lower costs, making some drugs like insulin more available at a time when its costs were skyrocketing. The rule was meant to offset some of those costs and came with no real cost to the taxpayers.
Early in the summer, the Biden administration caved to lobbyists by pausing the program before moving to outright kill it in June. This left a lot of health providers in dire straits, and some hospitals have had to shut down their emergency rooms as a result. Toward the end of June, it appeared that the Biden administration was walking back its decision. For now, the program lives on.
In the wake of all this, a new lawsuit from a pharmacy group in New York claims that four major drugmakers conspired to restrict the sale of insulin at a reduced price under rule 340b to their pharmacies.
The class-action lawsuit alleges that Sanofi, Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and AstraZeneca colluded in the summer of 2020 to restrict offering discounted products to 340B contract pharmacies.
The drugmakers should compete against each other, but instead “they worked together to boost their profits by coordinating to retract a long-standing discount for safety-net hospitals and clinics,” the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York said.
Mosaic argues that last summer the four drugmakers spent millions lobbying the federal government to limit 340B drug discounts for diabetes medicines such as insulin.
However, former President Donald Trump in July 2020 issued an executive order that aimed to ensure 1,000 community health centers would get insulin and injectable epinephrine at the 340B discounted rate.
While 340b is in effect, multiple drugmakers are allegedly moving to restrict the sale of insulin to healthcare providers at the reduced rate under the 340b program.
It is not very difficult to find stories of health providers hurt by the companies who did everything they could to avoid abiding by the rule. It is not very difficult to understand just how these companies are able to just ignore the rules. They pay a lot of money to lobbyists and to politicians to make sure they don't have to abide by the rules that hurt them.
Meanwhile, they are all too happy to jump on the rules that hurt the average American, like signing on to the Affordable Care Act - because even as you lose access to your healthcare provider and are mandated to buy insurance, the insurance companies and the drugmakers get paid regardless.
Rule 340b is one of those regulations you actually love to see. The problem is that the rule comes across as optional when you have enough money to tell Congress you're not actually going to follow it. My sincerest hope is that the politicians in Washington D.C. see what's going on and will do something to hold those companies accountable.
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I also want to take a moment and explain Bill Cassidy to some of y’all who either aren’t from Louisiana or don’t understand what is happening with the U.S. Senator at the moment.
Stop me if you've heard this one before.
Your state legislators are term-limited. You elect someone who you think is a pretty solid conservative. Votes the right way most of the time, says a lot of the right things. Yeah, they're not perfect. In fact, they might've only switched to the Republican party relatively recently (chances are you're in the South if that's the case). But still, you like the person.
Well, when that last term comes around, you notice something. The votes aren't as conservative as they used to be. The rhetoric isn't as dogmatic as you remember it being. The politician now doing what they think is right more than doing what you voted them to do.
Fun fact: What's right and what you want them to do are not always aligned. In fact, the longer the person is in office, the less aligned they are.
Soon, the politician has torched every single person who voted for him or her to be a conservative. There is little left in terms of alignment. They have embraced their true nature. They either decide to become a full-on Democrat or a full-on know-it-all who thinks you just don't know what's good for you.
(Note: That is a Venn diagram with a large overlap.)
This is Bill Cassidy at a federal level. He ran for the Senate in 2014 without much of a stellar career in the House. The peak of his career was beating the dynastic Mary Landrieu, who was the incumbent Senator, during the second midterm of the Obama years, helping to shift the balance of the Senate away from the Democratic Party.
When Cassidy initially ran, there was talk that he was just in it for two terms and then he'd be done. It makes sense. He'll be close to 70 by the time he's up for election again. As many have pointed out in their commentary of him, he was a Democrat until the early 2000s before switching parties when it became expedient to do so.
I could go on and on, but you get the point.
Cassidy has been defending the bipartisan infrastructure bill left and right to anyone who will listen, and has even gone on Twitter tirades about the bill. But the problem is that people are actually reading it. They know what's in it now, and no matter what he says, he's being proven wrong.
Here in Louisiana, Scott McKay is the publisher of The Hayride, and had this to say about the Senator on Monday.
The way these infrastructure bills ought to work in any event is they ought to be block grant money to states to supplement their capital outlay packages. The states know a lot better than the feds do what their infrastructure needs are. And if states steal the block grant money, well, that’s what the Department of Justice is for. If you want, then have the state legislatures send up requests in writing for their needs to be addressed in the block grants, and be subject to an audit of that spending.
Instead, it all comes top down. Which as we’ve seen, gives Cassidy a chance to crow about all the projects he got funded in the infrastructure bill.
But you won’t hear him crow about all the terrible garbage he’s making us swallow so that there’s money for a new bridge in Baton Rouge or for I-49 south from Lafayette through Bayou Country.
It isn’t so much that Bill Cassidy is a RINO or that he’s a sellout, though we are far from arguing he’s not those things. It’s that after all this time in public office he still doesn’t understand why the voters sent him to DC in the first place.
A state like Louisiana which votes Republican at a sixty percent clip is looking for strong voices who won’t fall for the kind of foolishness this bill represents. Not weaklings who get rolled over and then act like they’ve accomplished something.
It's not that Cassidy is a RINO or a secret Democrat, really. He is simply out to prove that he knows better than his constituents what the right decision is. In business, it is said that the customer is always right. In politics, most elected officials forget that the constituent is always right. They are supposed to be in Washington D.C. voting in the interest of their constituents, and while six billion dollars for Louisiana is great, the compounded effect of all this extra federal spending and inflation will hurt the constituents far more than an extension of an interstate through one of the larger metropolitan areas.
Cassidy is so convinced that he is right that he is making stupid mistakes. He put blinders on and is only focused on the rewards to Louisiana, and is getting absolutely wrecked by anyone who has actually read the bill.
When asked about that portion of the bill that says, "The term ‘‘per-mile user fee’’ means a revenue mechanism that - is applied to road users operating motor vehicles on the surface transportation system; and is based on the number of vehicle miles traveled by an individual road user," Cassidy told KEEL that that portion of the bill wasn't included.
"It's not in there," said Cassidy, insisting that the per-mile tax proposal mentioned in Section 13002 doesn't exist, "That's not in there."
But when the exact verbiage of the bill was read to him, the Senator seemed to change his tune. "There is that section. That's not the section I wrote. But I promise you there is no user fee being assessed," Cassidy then said, "I promise you there is not a user fee being assessed. It's a pilot. They could be taking vehicles that are belonging to the federal government and we want to see how it works."
This is the same Cassidy who ran as a pro-Trump candidate in 2020 and immediately turned around and voted to impeach Trump in the aftermath of the January 6 riot at the capitol. He is not a firebrand conservative, and never really was. He peaked when he beat a legacy Democrat seven years ago and he's on his way out.
The only surprise, really, is that he would decide to torch his voters this early into his final term. I figured we had a couple of years before he went that route.
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Last note this morning: Kids are starting to go back to school. This is a good thing, even amid the Delta surge. The data is actually started to suggest that by September we could see this surge mostly gone. But our kids need to be in schools full time. Last year was simply too much lost time, education, and development.
Good luck to your kids if they’re going back. If you’re a teacher, good luck in the coming year.