Office of the Attorney General
Attorney General Conway Announces $4.5 Million Settlement with Drug Company

Attorney General Jack Conway today announced a $4.5 million settlement with several U.S. subsidiaries of global pharmaceutical manufacturer Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, headquartered in Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany. The U.S. companies involved in the settlement are Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Boehringer Ingelheim Roxane, Inc., Roxane Laboratories, Inc. and Ben Venue Laboratories, Inc.

This is the latest in a number of settlements in the so-called Average Wholesale Price (AWP) lawsuits filed by the Office of the Attorney General against 47 pharmaceutical manufacturers. The Kentucky Medicaid program relies on these published AWPs to calculate Medicaid drug reimbursement rates.

The lawsuits allege that that the defendant drug companies published bogus and inflated AWPs for their drugs which did not bear any relationship to any prices that these companies actually charged their customers. The artificial "spread" between the bogus published prices and the real prices caused the Kentucky Medicaid program to pay millions of dollars more in drug reimbursements than it should have.

"My office is committed to ensuring that drug companies truthfully report their prices and do not engage in false or misleading marketing of their products," said General Conway. "Taxpayers should not be footing the bill for these inflated drug prices."

On June 24, General Conway announced a $16 million jury verdict in Franklin Circuit Court against generic drug giant Sandoz. In total, the Office of the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud and Abuse Control Unit has recovered a total of $26.5 million as a result of the AWP lawsuits.

Since taking office, General Conway has collected $63 million for the Medicaid program and for Kentucky taxpayers.

A settlement is not an admission of liability in a civil case.