More and more states are joining a major lawsuit to hold the makers of Insulin liable for price gouging American consumers for decades. Plus, a new book on its way in mid-March called, “Suspicious Activity,” that highlights the relationship between banks and terrorist organizations. That book is authored by Mike Papantonio, along with attorney Chris Paulos, who served as an advisor for the book.
Click here to order a copy of Mike Papantonio’s new book, “Suspicious Activity.”
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 Cousins: It’s almost common knowledge at this point that banks in the United States and across the globe have been laundering money for terrorists. They take money from terrorist organizations, disguise it in legitimate investments, then return it so the money looks clean. The United States Department of Justice has known about this for well over a decade, and they repeatedly do almost nothing about it other than fine the banks a couple billion dollars here, even though they made billions more in profits. There are lawsuits currently working their way through the courts to help hold these banks accountable and there’s also a new book on its way in mid-March called Suspicious Activity. That book is authored by Mike Papantonio, and I have Mike Papantonio, along with attorney Chris Paulos, who served as an advisor for the book. Chris has been working on these terrorism lawsuit cases, and I have them both with me right now. So, Pap, this new book, Suspicious Activity. Before we can even get into that, we’ve gotta go back several books, because this all began with a book called Law and Disorder. We then had Law and Vengeance, Law and Addiction, Inhuman Trafficking, and now Suspicious Activity. But we’re seeing the continuation of a story that developed in Law and Disorder with a lawyer named Nic Deketomis. So what does this new book, where do we find Deke now?
Mike Papantonio: Well, Deke has come through an evolution starting with Law and Disorder. His law firm has gotten bigger. He’s added some really interesting characters. Each one of the books, the reason that they come out surrounded with a lot of intrigue because the case itself that he’s working, they’re actually cases we handle in this law firm. The first case that was really talked about was the Yaz case that was in Law and Disorder, along with the PFAS case in that book. But that started with a Yaz product. It was made, supposedly, because it was a great birth control. The problem was it was killing women. It was killing with DVTs, a whole host of cardiac events. So we handled that case. We tried that first major case. I think the first one we tried, they ended up settling on the eve of trial because the discovery went so bad for ’em.
So you take a story like that and you build a fiction story around it, but it all centers around the character, Nicholas Deketomis, and the firm that specializes in this kind of case. The next one was Law and Vengeance. Law and Vengeance was about the gun manufacturing companies that had created a sight for a gun that was so far off that it would actually kill people by mistake that was within five degrees, five degrees of a point that they were aiming at if you were at 50 yards. So deaths flowed from that. The story centers around that. Inhuman Trafficking was the last one that I did, and that’s about the trafficking problem in the United States, and how we as a law firm jumped into that case. But it’s, again, it’s written around fiction and there aren’t quite as many murders in real life. Yeah.
Farron Cousins: So we’re now seeing the continuation of Deke’s story, the law firm’s story and this one, Suspicious Activity, deals with terrorism, but not just, we have terrorist attacks, but the bank’s role in all of this. So tell us what you can, without giving too much away, we still want people to be able to read it and be surprised. So lay this out for us as best you can here.
Mike Papantonio: Well, this law firm decided to go after, and that’s where Chris came in, Chris is the lawyer that’s handling that case against terrorists, and if you look at the HSBC case, it’s worth going and taking a look at the HSBC case. They were fined $1.9 billion, but what they knew was overwhelming. They knew that they were taking in dirty money, and then what they would do is they would do what they called layering. They’d take in the dirty money, and then they would layer it into real complex companies, complex banking avenues, and it would legitimize the money and it would come back out. And then the terrorists were able, or the drug cartels, whoever’s dealing with that washed money, were able to carry on life as usual. But the disappointment with that is that they knew, the government knew that they, Credit Suisse had been caught doing it. Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Credit Suisse, $530 million, Barclays, $290 million. These are the kind of fines that they gave these folks, but they still don’t get it. You see, the money’s too big. So let’s wash money for terrorist. Life goes on, right, Chris?
Chris Paulos: Yeah. It’s, unfortunately, banks are in a position to actually prevent terrorism and have made and taken steps where they have failed their duty, essentially. And the title of Suspicious Activity refers to one of the obligations that banks have to report suspicious activity of transactions that are flowing through their banks and through their correspondent banking accounts. And what we have seen time and time again, is banks actually taking affirmative steps to not report that suspicious activity, be willfully blind to it, and allow nefarious organizations, terrorist organizations, drug cartels and others to bank at their banks as customers and have beneficial ownership in accounts, and that goes unreported. And in some situations, these banks have actually established departments within those banks to specifically handle what they refer to as high risk customers, and to make sure that their transactions aren’t being flagged as suspicious so that regulators and the FBI and other, you know, the Department of Justice are able to prosecute them. So they have not only failed their duty, but they are now facilitating these types of actors and accessing funds needed for their illicit activities.
Farron Cousins: And there’s a good reason for that, right? You talk about these fines and a hundred million here, 500 million there, billions of dollars per year are going through these banks from these organizations. So, just so everyone is aware, this is not just one or two banks handling for one or two people. This is a well organized business for these individuals that carry out these attacks. Terrorism is a business and they run it like a business.
Mike Papantonio: It absolutely is.
