Miami Herald - July 21, 2005
Jennifer Babson, jbabson@herald.com

The suit follows legal action recently taken against the drug companies by a Key West pharmacy, Ven-A-Care of the Florida Keys. Ven-A-Care is a small specialty pharmacy created in the late 1980s that provides infusion, inhalation, and injectable pharmaceuticals to seriously ill outpatients, such as people suffering from AIDS.

The company has filed several other deceptive-pricing lawsuits -- some of which have since been settled -- against drug manufacturers as part of a nationwide push by state attorneys general and others to crack down on drug company pricing practices.

Efforts to reach several lawyers representing Ven-A-Care were unsuccessful Wednesday.

Crist's lawsuit claims that the three drug companies jacked up their Medicaid-reported prices to give pharmacies extra reimbursements for filling prescriptions for patients who bought generic drugs for depression, schizophrenia, seizures, angina and other illnesses.

Named in the lawsuit: Mylan Pharmaceuticals of West Virginia, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries of Israel, Watson Pharmaceuticals of California, as well as various parent and subsidiary companies. Teva officials were not available for comment Wednesday evening.

Watson spokeswoman Patty Eisenhaur told Dow Jones Newswires that the company had not had a chance to review the complaint in depth and said Watson has disclosed similar lawsuits in other states in its Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

A spokesman for Mylan told the news service he was looking into the matter.

The manufacturers, Crist's lawsuit said, used the potential disparity between actual prices and governmentreported prices as a marketing tool, advising pharmacies they would increase their profits if they sold the companies' products instead of competitors'.

Florida's Medicaid program reimburses pharmacies, physicians and medical providers for drugs they dispense to patients based on the drugs' average wholesale prices -- which the manufacturers are supposed to report accurately.

The inflation schemes began as early as 1994 and allegedly resulted in hundreds of thousands of false claims, the suit says. The suit alleges violations of the Florida False Claims Act, which would allow triple damages, increasing the state's potential recovery to $75 million.

"The message should be very clear: This is not something that we are willing to tolerate if these people are going to artificially inflate their prices -- basically lie cheat and steal," Crist said late Wednesday.

Crist said he expects the drug pricing suit will not be Florida's last.

"I think we are just at the tip of the iceberg," he said.

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