Broward School Board sues drug manufacturers, pharmacies over insulin prices
WLRN | By Carlton Gillespie | September 2, 2024
The Broward County School Board is suing a group of insulin manufacturers they allege have conspired to inflate prices for the drug — whose price they say has risen more than tenfold in the last 20 years.
The school district is self-insured, meaning they foot the bill for the healthcare costs of their employees. As many as 3,500 Broward School Board employees may be impacted by these price increases.
The board is alleging that the skyrocketing price of insulin is not natural, according to a report in the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“Over that time, the average cost of consumer goods and services has almost doubled,” reads the lawsuit’s summary. “The cost of some diabetes medications has risen more than tenfold.”
Eli Lilly and Company, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi, which the board in an executive summary refers to as “the Insulin Cartel,” control 99% of the insulin market.
The suit also names pharmacy benefits managers (PBM) CVS Health, Express Scripts and OptumRx — and claims they collude to widen the gap between the manufacturer’s price and the selling price.
PBMs are third party companies that manage prescription drug benefits and act as intermediaries between insurance companies, pharmacies, and drug manufacturers.
When healthcare prices rise, the Broward County Public Schools district budget feels the impact. Juan Martinez, a lawyer from Morgan & Morgan, told the board that the insulin expenses can add up.
“By our estimations, for every single insulin dependent diabetic that the School Board covers, you’re paying an excess of $5,000 to $6,000 per user, which is money that the board could use for a myriad of reasons,” he said.
The board agreed to contract the law firms Morgan & Morgan, Kopelowitz Ostrow Ferguson Weiselberg Gilbert, and Haliczer Pettis & Schwamm, P.A. The board joins a growing list of local governments and state Attorneys General in a multi-district litigation in their suit.
Since the lawyers are working on a fee contingency basis, the board incurs no upfront cost and will not pay unless and until damages are recovered. The lawyers’ fee would be 25% of recovered damages.
An Eli Lilly spokesperson told the Sun Sentinel the allegations are “baseless.” The spokesperson added that “Counties and other local governments that have filed similar lawsuits have since abandoned these allegations because they were both aware of and benefited from these supposedly ‘secret’ rebates.”
Mike DeAngeli, a spokesman for CVS Health, said the claims that “we play any role in determining the prices charged by manufacturers for their products are false, and we intend to vigorously defend against this baseless suit.”
