Drug companies face state lawsuits for allegedly inflating prices, which may have caused taxpayers to fork over too much money in Medicaid reimbursements, the attorney general’s office says.
The state accuses 23 drug companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer of inflating the average wholesale prices on some of the $150 million of prescription medications Medicaid buys every year, costing Idaho taxpayers million of dollars.
A goal of the scheme, according to the three lawsuits filed in 4th District Court, was to encourage physicians and pharmacies to buy the drugmakers’ products by offering “windfall profits” generated by an inflated spread between what providers pay and what Medicaid reimburses. The three suits were filed in 2007; court documents allege that some prices were boosted from 19 percent to more than 4,000 percent.
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