AAM President Pushes Back at AG Price-Fixing Suits

Attorneys General who have painted the generics industry as an illegal price-fixing cabal should face their state employee health plans and demand they only pay for brand name drugs, the head of the largest generics lobbying group said.

Chip Davis, president and CEO of the Association for Accessible Medicines, said some AGs are “clearly” trying their price-fixing cases “in the court of public opinion,” and if generics companies named in their lawsuits were as wicked as the attorneys claim, they should instruct their own state employee health plans to buy brands only “on high moral grounds… and see how they settle their budget deficit when they do it.”

Davis spoke in Washington, D.C. at a June 5 forum hosted by Axios and sponsored by Pfizer.

Attorneys general in dozens of states have filed wide ranging lawsuits against several generic drug makers, claiming they worked together between 2011 and 2015 to fix drug prices. Davis said that generic prices have fallen in 35 of the last 37 months. Generics make up 90 percent of prescriptions written but only 22 percent of the costs.