CVS, Walgreens To Pay More Than $10 Billion To Settle Opioid Lawsuits (wsj.com) 55
CVS and Walgreens have agreed to pay more than $10 billion in a landmark settlement to resolve opioid-crisis lawsuits brought by states, cities and other governments. From a report: The two largest U.S. drugstore chains said they reached a framework to settle the collection of lawsuits brought by governments and Native American tribes blaming pharmacies for helping fuel the nation's opioid epidemic. Under the proposed deal, CVS would pay $4.9 billion to states and municipalities and $130 million to tribes over the next 10 years starting in 2023. The company said the agreement isn't an admission of guilt and that it would continue to defend against any litigation that the settlement doesn't resolve.
Walgreens said it has offered to pay up to $4.79 billion to states over 15 years and about $155 million to tribes. It also expects to pay up to $753.5 million in attorneys fees over six years. The company said the settlement wasn't an admission of wrongdoing. Each state, local government and tribe still must decide whether to participate in the settlement. Plaintiffs' attorneys appointed to lead the negotiations said they encouraged governments and tribes to join the settlement, which they said holds the pharmacies accountable. CVS Chief Executive Karen Lynch, on a call with analysts, said the settlement is in the "best interests of all parties and helps put a decades-old issue behind us." CVS has been in a separate legal battle with its insurers over whether they should cover some of the liability the company faces for the opioid lawsuits.
Walgreens said it has offered to pay up to $4.79 billion to states over 15 years and about $155 million to tribes. It also expects to pay up to $753.5 million in attorneys fees over six years. The company said the settlement wasn't an admission of wrongdoing. Each state, local government and tribe still must decide whether to participate in the settlement. Plaintiffs' attorneys appointed to lead the negotiations said they encouraged governments and tribes to join the settlement, which they said holds the pharmacies accountable. CVS Chief Executive Karen Lynch, on a call with analysts, said the settlement is in the "best interests of all parties and helps put a decades-old issue behind us." CVS has been in a separate legal battle with its insurers over whether they should cover some of the liability the company faces for the opioid lawsuits.
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Re:I need more context (Score:5, Interesting)
There are laws that require them to check whether things are actually what they appear.
Just turning a blind eye when the prescriptions of heroin triple in one month is very much not what they're supposed to be doing.
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Ah, the "just following orders" defense. Didnt work for Nazis either.
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That's absurd. It's what we expect pharmacies to do -- fill whatever prescription they're given that follows the legal process for drug prescribing -- is the doctor the legitimate holder of a DEA license for the drug they're prescribing and is the drug in question being prescribed in some legitimate amount.
If you make pharmacies gatekeepers, then you get right wing religious nuts who won't fill birth control prescriptions, Scientologists who won't fill psychiatric medications and all other manner of weirdo
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"In the suit, attorneys for Lake and Trumbull counties in northeastern Ohio had argued that the chains failed to stop pain pills from flooding the counties and false prescriptions from being filled. The counties argued that by enabling the opioid crisis the pharmacy companies had created a public nuisance costing them each about $1 billion in law-enforcement, social-services and court expenses." https://www.wsj.com/articles/o... [wsj.com]
These pharmacies were seeing massive and obvious spikes in opioid prescriptions
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No one is saying MDs are pharmacists or should say "no" to a patient with a valid subscription (although you're ignoring that part of what they were found guilty of was accepting forgeries), you're making that up. What is being said is that pharmacists, accountants, order people, and all sorts of others should have noticed the sudden and extreme increase in prescriptions for opiates and alerted the authorities.
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Oops, sorry. "No one is saying pharmacists are MDs..."
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Actually. Yes. That's exactly what a drug dispenser should be doing.
And it had nothing to do with a 'new drug' being released.
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Because the GP did? I was replying to the assertion that if sales triple in a month, a pharmacist should shut down sales of that drug.
No, the OP stated the obvious: "Just turning a blind eye when the prescriptions of heroin triple in one month is very much not what they're supposed to be doing." Pharmacy and their parent companies were either not noticing the massive amount of painkillers being prescribed which far exceed the populations or they were willfully ignorant about the number of scripts. Either way, these are controlled substances not the new flavor of the month that pharmaceutical companies massively advertise. Oxycodone itself
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Huey Lewis and the News were very disappointed when denied the new drug.
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Heroin is not something available by prescription, that is the name of a non-pharmaceutical drug. The chemical name, the name that would show on a prescription, is something like diamorphine. If you really want to know the name then look it up. The FDA made it illegal to prescribe this for some of the stupidest reasons so it would not be prescribed, and if it was prescribed (such as might happen in Europe where the law is different) then it would not be called heroin on the prescription.
There's a very si
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There's a very simple reason why prescriptions of pain medications might go up suddenly. If a battalion of soldiers just came back from deployment then there's going to be a bunch of people that have been shot, stabbed, fell from helicopters, blown through walls, beaten, bruised, broken, and just plain worn out. They are going to need pain management, potentially for the rest of their lives.
Nitpick: Most of them would be getting their drugs, including pain management, through the VA health system. Not the local pharmacy. It costs more to go through them(I'm a vet).
That said, I have some thoughts:
1. While the GP, splutty, talks about heroin prescriptions tripling in one month, as others mentioned, it isn't heroin, probably mostly Oxycontin,
2. I see no evidence of prescriptions jumping that tremendously in the article. It's equally valid that the increase was gradual, and thus wouldn't be
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Yes. They called it Oxycodone, because calling it Heroin would've been too obvious.
There's no appreciable difference between the two other than legally.
Re: I need more context (Score:3)
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They're only supposed to make sure the doctor writing the prescription has a valid DEA license. There's room for some minor sanity checks, like if the prescription says "1,000 Oxycodone and unlimited refills".
Doctors can write a prescription for any drug they want for any reason they want -- this is called off-label prescribing. There's no way a pharmacist just look at the medication being prescribed and have any idea whether its suitable because they don't know anything about the patient's condition or t
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I don't know how these things works in the united states, but here in Norway the pharmacies have some sort of checks and balances with regards to prescriptions.
If a doctor has subscribed you "1 pill, 3 times per day" then someone will react if try to withdraw more than 100 tablets per month. I don't know the exact limits, and of course there is some leeway (lost some pills, need some extra before going away on vacation, nice to have a small buffer etc), but in general it is not a free for all even if you ha
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If a doctor has subscribed you "1 pill, 3 times per day" then someone will react if try to withdraw more than 100 tablets per month.
Is that just for things that might be addictive? Because I've always worried about policies like that, which arbitrarily prevent people from stocking up on things that might be required to keep them alive. It basically means that they may be guaranteed to die if there's a breakdown in the supply chain. Consider Ukraine, for example. How many people there have ended up in occupied territory unable to fill their prescriptions and trying to get by on quarter doses until they finally run out? Even outside of su
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It's part of the pharmacist's responsibility not to overfill a prescription, and the pharmacy keeps records so it can keep track of that. If the records aren't being used for that purpose, then what are they being used for? Just monetization?
They didnâ(TM)t hire enough pharmacists and technicians or train them to stop that from happening and failed to implement systems that could flag suspicious orders [latimes.com]
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If so who should it raise the issue with if a doctor is over-prescribing?
Everyone should have raised issues. The pharmacist seeing a large number of scripts should have altered corporate. Inventory managers who need to order lots more controlled substances should have raised concerns. Accountants noticing increased sales of controlled substances should have raised concerns. The pharmacy company should have people in place whose job is to police controlled substances specifically. The problem was not an extra bottle or two of pills. There was a noticeable increase.
I asked because as read the summary suggested that they were just being punished for filling prescriptions
The summary and
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knowingly allowing illegal trafficking of drugs NEEDS to get the management JAILED just as if a person did the same thing... it would seem you just need to break the law in massively huge organized ways to avoid jail time and just get the company a big fine which they will amortize into almost nothing; certainly not in any way that impacts the parties responsible.
Re:I need more context (Score:5, Interesting)
At first glance (and perhaps I'm wrong, please tell me if I am) they're being penalized for fulfilling prescriptions they don't have much control over.
Dug into it very briefly (about two minute's sleuthing), and it sounds like there are a few allegations or concerns:
- They were filling prescriptions that they knew to be false (i.e. forged)
- They were filling prescriptions that they knew were being diverted to others
- They were filling prescriptions that they knew were inappropriate (e.g. overprescription, whether from single providers or patients hitting up multiple providers)
While we oftentimes treat pharmacies as a "dumb" retail shop for drugs who have little-to-no say (e.g. as you did in the quoted text, and as I frequently do in my own thinking), legally, medically, and ethically they are not. Pharmacists are medical professionals more akin to doctors than store clerks and pharmacies are obligated—legally, medically, and ethically—to be "smart" participants in the care of their patients.
When doctors don't coordinate your care between themselves and unknowingly prescribe a dangerous combination of drugs? The pharmacist is there to save you. When a doctor isn't aware of an interaction? Pharmacists are the last line of defense. When there are signs that a patient isn't receiving their prescription or that others are being harmed by drugs they aren't supposed to be receiving? Pharmacists may not take the Hippocratic Oath to "do no harm" (they take the Oath of the Pharmacist), but they are supposed to be catching that sort of behavior so it can be addressed by the doctor who did take the oath, since that prescription is harming someone.
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In reality, this setup is a farce. Pop into any pharmacy and look at how crazy busy they are. Any contraindications or bad combinations are most likely flagged by the computer, not the pharmacist. Sure, maybe they know a few high profile conflicts between specific drugs and drug families, but there's no way they've memorized the entire Physician's Desk Reference. No pharmacist has the time to interact with doctors about the appropriateness of more than a handful of prescriptions and I'd wager those invo
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Thanks to pill mills and addicts, it's almost impossible to obtain pain medication beyond Advil. The threat of lawsuits and criminal investigations has made it so doctors won't prescribe them for any reason. I had a root canal a couple years ago and they wouldn't give me even one single pill. My wife had a c-section and Ibuprophen was all they'd prescribe. It takes a background check just to buy Sudafed.
I wish these junkies would stick to heroin or something. They've caused this problem for the rest of
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Fines are nothing (Score:2)
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illegible drs signatures are not helping
Win, Lawyers? (Score:5, Insightful)
If any of this money was actually going to be seen when it went to treatment, I might be able to overlook the fact that these pharmacies were just filling scripts by the local doctors writing them.
So far billions have been paid to counties and states all over the U.S. with these opioid lawsuits. With the amount of money paid out to these places, one would expect to see the streets lined with free treatment centers. Not only are there not free treatment center lining the streets, but people are still dying in record numbers. The only difference is that now that these folks can't get opiates that are safe, they die of fentanyl in larger numbers.
All these lawsuits do is pit the medical industry against patients, further increasing the cost to us end users and the time it takes to get anything done.
--
A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats. - Benjamin Franklin
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If any of this money was actually going to be seen when it went to treatment, I might be able to overlook the fact that these pharmacies were just filling scripts by the local doctors writing them.
So far billions have been paid to counties and states all over the U.S. with these opioid lawsuits. With the amount of money paid out to these places, one would expect to see the streets lined with free treatment centers. Not only are there not free treatment center lining the streets, but people are still dying in record numbers. The only difference is that now that these folks can't get opiates that are safe, they die of fentanyl in larger numbers.
All these lawsuits do is pit the medical industry against patients, further increasing the cost to us end users and the time it takes to get anything done.
-- A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats. - Benjamin Franklin
As the old saying goes around here, "Where are my mod points when I need them?". This ^^^^^ in a nutshell. Mod insightful.
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All these lawsuits do is pit the medical industry against patients, further increasing the cost to us end users and the time it takes to get anything done.
Allow me to further clarify from the perspective of the perpetually guilty:
"The company said the settlement wasn't an admission of wrongdoing."
That is the end goal now. Every time. And while IANAL, gut feeling this is exactly how you also eliminate the risk of a class-action lawsuit coming at you later. Greed playing the double jeopardy card.
This will become American Medicine 101 to the point that you better start expecting it from now on.
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Yes. As another old saying goes: "Prohibition Doesn't Work",
Epidemic of pain in USA (Score:5, Interesting)
While the government is making it difficult to prescribe effective pain management there's people with chronic pain not getting the care they need to lead productive lives.
https://www.fiercehealthcare.c... [fiercehealthcare.com]
Take notice of the photo in the article. In the photo it gives a common prescription for most any opioid, take one or two tablets every four to six hours as needed for pain. I'm seeing prescriptions for taking one half tablet every eight hours. That's not pain management, that is creating a tolerance problem. People become tolerant to the medications because the pain is never relieved by the prescription. This means the patient asks for more and more, often never getting enough to relieve the pain but still building a tolerance. There is a reason why the manufacturers recommend one or two tablets every four to six hours for pain, that's because that is the most effective dose with the lowest probability of harm. It is just as harmful to give too little as it is to give too much.
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look up oxycodone; 10-15mg/4 hours. Look up Oxycontin -- 12 hour dosing is manufacturers (Purdue) instructions. Half tab -- what size? 20mg? That's normal, sorta, as Purdue charges /pill not per mg. Oxycontin is only good for 6-8 hours depending on tolerance. Tolerance isn't so so much an issue as increasing tolerance. I have a tolerance for water -- need to drink to survive, but rarely does it require increasing amount. Same can be said for many drugs needed for day-to-day medication of symptoms.
But
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There are plenty of studies that show a combination of acetaminophen and ibuprofen are just as effective as these addictive opiods.
The real problem and threat to USA is poor health ... including the over prescription of all medications. The average American is becoming drugged, alcoholic and overweight. If you make any mention of this or suggest regulation you are labeled a body shaming communist / socialist.
Wasted money (Score:2)
In other words, continuing to tell people about the dangers of drug use, the same thing which has been done for over sixty years (if not longer).
And yet, here we are, trying to thwart personal responsibility by throwing more money at it. At some point we need to let nature take its course. We can't babysit everyone.
Yet people... (Score:2)
Ignored red flags (Score:2)
Since the link is paywalled, I can't read it, but a Reuters articles says they "ignored red flags" that should have tipped them off something illegal is going on. https://www.reuters.com/busine... [reuters.com]
Working for a bank, we are required to take training to spot money laundering every year. The bank can be held liable for money laundering even if criminals go to great lengths to hide it from us. Just saying "they didn't tell us it was illegal" isn't a defense.