More and more states are joining a major lawsuit to hold the makers of Insulin liable for price gouging American consumers for decades. These lawsuits could force the companies to pay up big time for scamming the public. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
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Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: More and more states are joining a major lawsuit to hold the makers of insulin liable for price gouging. American consumers for decades have been putting up with that price gouging. These lawsuits could force the companies to pay up big time. Full disclosure, this is my lawsuit. This is our lawsuit. We originated this, but talk about it. Why don’t you talk about it, PBMs and that type of thing.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Well, what we have right now is we have state attorneys general that are joining into this lawsuit. So entire states, Oklahoma just announced a couple days ago, they’re the most recent state joining in on this. Because what’s been found is that, again, for decades and decades, the drug companies, along with the PBMs, the pharmaceutical benefit managers at the health insurance companies.
Mike Papantonio: Explain, take a minute and explain that just a tad. Just gimme a little 10,000 foot because people don’t know what a PBM is.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. We did a big segment on it about couple weeks ago. The PBM is the person that works at the health insurance company that says what drugs we will cover, how much of each drug we cover. And usually they’re tied at the hip, not just with the company they work for, but with the drug companies themselves.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: They negotiate these prices like, hey, we’ll cover 50% of it. You get the rest, I get some, the insurance company gets a little bit.
Mike Papantonio: It’s all kickbacks.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, it is.
Mike Papantonio: They wanna call it rebates. It’s kickbacks. It’s pure kickbacks. You do this for me and we’re gonna pay you money that’s kickback money. And so what they do is, the competitors out there, if you’re a drug company, you want the PBM to endorse, have a formulary to endorse your product. Right. And so the PBMs make money by scaring the hell out of all the competitors. If you don’t give us these kickbacks, then you may not be on the list. And if you’re too cheap, if your price is not high enough, you might not be on the list because the PBM makes kickback money based on a percentage of what they’re able to put forward. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. And what we found out, again, that this has been taking place with insulin for a very long time. Because obviously insulin is one of the most widely used drugs in the United States. Millions of people every day are taking insulin. So yeah, the pharmaceutical, or excuse me, the health insurance companies pretty much have to cover it. So these PBMs and the drug companies have all the power to set the price. And over the last 20 years, we have seen over a 1000% increase in spite of the fact nothing’s changed with the drug. The cost to produce it has gotten lower. But we are getting screwed hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars a month.
Mike Papantonio: And so what Eli Lilly says, oh, well this is R and D. There hasn’t been R and D. This drug’s been around a hundred years. As a matter of fact, the interesting part about the guy who developed the drug gave it away. He said, I shouldn’t have this. This can save people’s lives. He gave it away. But then all the bottom feeders, they came in and said, well, you can’t give something away. We need to make millions. So Eli Lilly made $22 billion on it last year. $22 billion where people weren’t even getting enough insulin to be able to keep themselves healthy because they couldn’t afford it.
Farron Cousins: Right. They had to ration it.
Mike Papantonio: They had to ration it. 5,000, almost $6,000 is what the, for insulin, what some of these folks are paying. These companies are making 20, 30, $40 billion selling these products, and they still want more. And when you say, well, you need to pay more. They say, oh, no, no, no. We can’t do that. We have R and D, our research and development. Hell, there is no research and development. But why is it that we don’t have any body in Congress with big enough kahunas to say, look, you gotta stop it. This is one that should have been stopped by this administration.
Farron Cousins: Absolutely. And look, they’ve done studies, they found that the cost of insulin to still give a big profit to the drug companies should be anywhere between $48 and $71 a year. And drug companies would still pull in massive profits off of it.
Mike Papantonio: Can you imagine having somebody in your family, or somebody you know, that says, I can only take half of what I’m supposed to take to keep myself alive because I can’t afford it. Now there’s special programs. But when you look at, and I remember them coming out, like a week after we filed this lawsuit, they came out with this big PR deal. And that’s, well, we’re gonna be lowering prices. It’s smoke and mirrors. They’re not lowering anything. They’re still making a killing. PBMs are killing this country. And the companies like Eli Lilly, they’re right in there with them and nothing seems to be able to change that, is it?
Farron Cousins: Nope. Not as far as we’ve seen. These lawsuits are probably the best hope to do that.
Mike Papantonio: Well, I’m hoping it is. We’ve done a lot of good things with cases like this. Farron, thanks for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week, but all these segments are gonna be posted right here on this channel in the coming week. So make sure you’ve subscribed. I’m Mike Papantonio, and this has been America’s Lawyer, where every week we tell you stories that corporate media simply won’t tell you. It’s not tough. Advertisers don’t let ’em tell the story. They threaten the company of pulling advertising dollars if they tell stories about companies like, pharmaceutical companies or weapons industry. The other part is that their attachment to their party, Republican or Democrat, is so deep that they can’t be objective anymore. They can’t tell other parts of the story. But you know what? We don’t have that problem here. We’re gonna tell it just as we see it. Hopefully we’ll see you next time.
