Alaska has joined with 44 other states and Puerto Rico in releasing a complaint against Teva Pharmaceuticals and 19 of the nation’s largest generic drug manufacturers for alleged efforts to artificially inflate prices, hinder competition and retrain trade in the industry.
Among the evidence now public are emails between generic drug manufacturers coordinating their response to a congressional inquiry, emails enforcing “fair share” and “playing nice in the sandbox” market allocation, “fluff pricing” strategy and other brazen coordination to artificially inflate prices, hinder competition and unreasonably restrain trade across the industry, Alaska Attorney General Kevin Clarkson said in a statement issued on June 25.
The lawsuit, in which Alaska was an initial participant, was first filed on May 10, in U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.
Clarkson said he is glad the courts agreed to disclose the full, unredacted 510-page complaint so that Alaskans “can see the misleading and illegal collusion these companies appear to have been engaged in. And all at the expense of people’s health.”
In one example cited by Clarkson, senior executives at Myland and Sandoz allegedly colluded to divvy up market share for a blood pressure medication.
The complaint argues that for years the generic pharmaceutical industry has operated with an understanding among generic manufacturers not to compete with each other and to instead settle for what these competitors refer to as “fair share.”
Rather than enter a particular generic drug market by competing on price in order to gain market share, competitors in the generic drug industry would systematically and routinely communicate with one another directly, divvy up customers to create an artificial equilibrium in the market, and then maintain anticompetitively high prices, the complaint said.
The complaint seeks a jury trial on all 34 counts of the complaint, for conspiracy to allocate markets and fix prices for multiple generic drugs in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which outlaws monopolistic business practices.
