California sued GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and 37 other pharmaceutical companies as part of a lawsuit accusing drugmakers of defrauding the state’s $34 billion Medi-Cal program by inflating prescription prices.
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who sued Abbott Laboratories in 2003, added the other companies in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston today. The suit says the companies supplied inflated prices to industry publications used by Medi-Cal to reimburse health-care providers for drug costs.
More than a dozen states have sued drugmakers for allegedly charging too much for medicines used in government health programs. The suit says that published prices used by Medi-Cal, the state’s health program for the poor, to set reimbursement rates for doctors are much higher than what doctors pay for the medicines they administer to patients.
