The top leadership of CVS Health directed an illegal scheme to work across the corporation’s sprawling subsidiaries to drive up drug prices in the Medicare program, says a whistleblower suit that was recently unsealed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
It accuses CVS of breaching firewalls between its SilverScript prescription drug plan, CVS Caremark, its pharmacy middleman, and its vast chain of retail stores. The scheme is intended to block seniors’ access to cheaper generic drugs in exchange for big rebates from the manufacturers of the drugs that were covered, the suit alleges.
The lawsuit, which was first reported by Stat News, comes after years of suspicion in Ohio that CVS’s firewalls have been less than impregnable. And it comes after the Federal Trade Commission earlier this month said it would investigate whether health giants like CVS were using their “vertical integration” — dominance in several aspects of health care — to engage in anticompetitive practices.
Collusion between divisions of CVS “has created a veritable playground of opportunities to hold off generic (drug) competition, allowing the Drug Makers free reign to block beneficiary access to less costly generic drugs, frequently authorized generics,” the whistleblower suit says.
It adds, “This obstruction would otherwise have been impossible if the CVS Health entities had not colluded together, particularly given their different competing interests, which were supposedly firewalled off from each...
False. Of the ten videos, this compilation features at least five old clips from Gaza and two from the aftermath of the 2023 earthquake in Turkey. A video compilation showing various scenes of dest...