States Join Together To Sue Insulin Makers Over INSANE Price Gouging

More and more states are joining a major lawsuit to hold the makers of Insulin liable for price gouging American consumers for decades. These lawsuits could force the companies to pay up big time for scamming the public. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

More and more states are joining a major lawsuit to hold the makers of insulin liable for price gouging. American consumers for decades have been putting up with that price gouging. These lawsuits could force the companies to pay up big time. Full disclosure, this is my lawsuit. This is our lawsuit. We originated this, but talk about it. Why don't you talk about it, PBMs and that type of thing.

Yeah. Well, what we have right now is we have state attorneys general that are joining into this lawsuit. So entire states, Oklahoma just announced a couple days ago, they're the most recent state joining in on this. Because what's been found is that, again, for decades and decades, the drug companies, along with the PBMs, the pharmaceutical benefit managers at the health insurance companies.

Explain, take a minute and explain that just a tad. Just gimme a little 10,000 foot because people don't know what a PBM is.

Yeah. We did a big segment on it about couple weeks ago. The PBM is the person that works at the health insurance company that says what drugs we will cover, how much of each drug we cover. And usually they're tied at the hip, not just with the company they work for, but with the drug companies themselves.

Right.

They negotiate these prices like, hey, we'll cover 50% of it. You get the rest, I get some, the insurance company gets a little bit.

It's all kickbacks.

Yeah, it is.

They wanna call it rebates. It's kickbacks. It's pure kickbacks. You do this for me and we're gonna pay you money that's kickback money. And so what they do is, the competitors out there, if you're a drug company, you want the PBM to endorse, have a formulary to endorse your product. Right. And so the PBMs make money by scaring the hell out of all the competitors. If you don't give us these kickbacks, then you may not be on the list. And if you're too cheap, if your price is not high enough, you might not be on the list because the PBM makes kickback money based on a percentage of what they're able to put forward. Right?

Right. And what we found out, again, that this has been taking place with insulin for a very long time. Because obviously insulin is one of the most widely used drugs in the United States. Millions of people every day are taking insulin. So yeah, the pharmaceutical, or excuse me, the health insurance companies pretty much have to cover it. So these PBMs and the drug companies have all the power to set the price. And over the last 20 years, we have seen over a 1000% increase in spite of the fact nothing's changed with the drug. The cost to produce it has gotten lower. But we are getting screwed hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars a month.

And so what Eli Lilly says, oh, well this is R and D. There hasn't been R and D. This drug's been around a hundred years. As a matter of fact, the interesting part about the guy who developed the drug gave it away. He said, I shouldn't have this. This can save people's lives. He gave it away. But then all the bottom feeders, they came in and said, well, you can't give something away. We need to make millions. So Eli Lilly made $22 billion on it last year. $22 billion where people weren't even getting enough insulin to be able to keep themselves healthy because they couldn't afford it.

Right. They had to ration it.

They had to ration it. 5,000, almost $6,000 is what the, for insulin, what some of these folks are paying. These companies are making 20, 30, $40 billion selling these products, and they still want more. And when you say, well, you need to pay more. They say, oh, no, no, no. We can't do that.