Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing some major drug manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers over a conspiracy that they willingly increased the price of insulin by 1,000%.
Those mentioned in the lawsuit include Eli Lilly, Express Scripts and CVS Pharmacy. An insulin pricing scheme violates the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Paxton said these companies acted illegally and unethically to enrich themselves.
“This is a disturbing conspiracy by which pharmaceutical companies were intentionally and artificially inflating the price of insulin," AG Paxton said. "Big Pharma insulin manufacturers and PBMs worked together to take advantage of diabetes patients and drive prices as high as they could.”
The drug manufacturers are said to have artificially raised the prices of insulin before paying an undisclosed amount of money back to the PBMs as a quid pro quo. These synthetic insulin drugs cost less than $2 to produce and were originally priced at $20 when released in the late 1990s. Today, they now cost the consumer between $300 and $700.