AG Jennings sues Big Pharma over insulin price hikes

Attorney General Jennings today announced a lawsuit against several drug manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) who conspired to increase insulin prices by as much as 1,000 percent over the past fifteen years.

"The level of greed that would drive someone to price-gouge consumers over life-saving diabetes medicine is almost unfathomable," said Attorney General Kathy Jennings. "It is an avarice that not only hurts diabetics across the country financially, but in many cases leads to medication hoarding and preventable deaths. The thousands of Delawareans living with diabetes need to know that we will hold these companies accountable."

The lawsuit was filed in the Court of Chancery against the nation's three primary insulin manufacturers (Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi) and its three largest pharmacy benefit managers (CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx). It alleges that the pharmacy benefit manager defendants used their near-absolute control of pricing, dispensing, and reimbursement systems in Delaware to coordinate with the manufacturer defendants to illegally raise insulin prices by astronomical levels at the expense of diabetes patients in Delaware.

In Delaware, the public health impact of diabetes is staggering: roughly 112,000 Delawareans live with diabetes, and another 130,000 live with prediabetes, putting them at greater risk for developing diabetes in the future. The disease costs Delaware's economy roughly $1.1 billion per year. The uninsured population has a diabetes prevalence rate of nearly twice the state's average, which has left them especially susceptible to injury from the illegal pricing scheme. Nearly all diabetics in Delaware rely on daily insulin treatments to survive.