New Lawsuit Targets Express Scripts As Opioid Crisis Culprit

The state of Kentucky has filed a lawsuit against one of the largest pharmacy benefit manger companies for their role in fueling the opioid crisis and the thousands of deaths that came along with it. 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.

The state of Kentucky's filed a lawsuit against one of the largest pharmacy benefit managers company, PBM, for their role in fueling the opioid crisis. You know, we started the opioid lawsuit right here at this law firm, and we settled most of it for about $60 billion for the nation. That's for every state getting part of that and being able to hopefully build rehab centers and make the drug companies have to pay, foot the bill for some of that. And I've handled everything from tobacco to 80 of the biggest pharmaceutical cases in America to 12 of the biggest environmental cases. I have never, ever seen a quality of ugly that I saw in this case, coming from the people at the very top who, oh, by the way, were never thrown in prison. Eric Holder had the opportunity to put a few of them in prison right out in Colorado. Right. You remember that?

Yep.

The federal prosecutor in Colorado said, we need to prosecute these people. Eric Holder says, no, we're not going to prosecute. Well, it's because that's what he did for a living. He represented white collar criminals before he was with the AGs office, and then after he left office, he went back with the same law firm in DC called Covington Burling. So nothing really happened here. But this is being open. We're handling, not this case, but we're handling several cases like it all around the country where PBMs, talk about what a PBM is. People don't even know what it is.

Yeah. We did a huge story on these PBMs, pharmacy benefit managers, a couple months ago. Just exposing it. It's a scam is what it is, to start with. PBMs are an absolute scam that make consumers pay more money.

Totally.

So what they do is they say, okay, well you got your pharmacy and you've got your insurance, and yeah, they could work together, but I'm going to be the intermediary. I'm going to go to the insurance company and say, hey, insurance company, you need to cover these drugs from this pharmacy, cover these drugs from this pharmacy. And then he goes to the pharmacy and says, okay, look, I've got 'em willing to cover this, but there's another pharmacy down the street that is going to give me a rebate of X amount of dollars. If you can't do that, this insurance company, they'll cover pharmacy one, but they're not going to cover it from you and they just get kickbacks all day. That's what it is.

It's not a rebate. It's bribery.

It is.

It's bribery and kickbacks that we allow. I just wrote a book about it. It comes out, matter of fact, it's being advertised right now on Amazon. It's called Middleman. It's a fiction that surrounds the case, the PBM case that we're handling. But it is such, it's a totally unnecessary step in delivery from the manufacturer to the consumer. They're right here in the middle and they say, if you don't give us bribery kickbacks, we're not going to allow your drug to be sold at this pharmacy. If you don't give us bribery kickbacks, we're not going to allow you to set a price on your drug that you want to set. There's no, there is zero, zero thing that these folks do besides that. We are going to.

They bring no good to the world at all.

Zero. And so the AG in Kentucky's doing it, in a sense, it's a minor case. We're handling the bigger cases all over the country with bigger states and they're all going after the PBMs. And we will rock their world and hopefully, we won't just take a bunch of money away from 'em, we will hopefully change the way they do business.