BATON ROUGE- More than $186 million siphoned from Louisiana's taxpayers has been recovered since February 2012 from 27 pharmaceutical manufacturers that cheated the state Medicaid program, Attorney General Buddy Caldwell announced today. These funds, including $83.3 million in the most recent settlements, are the result of Caldwell's office aggressively pursuing the recovery of Louisiana taxpayer's vital Medicaid dollars. This litigation is being handled jointly by outside contract counsel along with Louisiana Department of Justice in-house assistant attorneys general.
"Our aggressive pursuit of these companies has yielded record amounts recovered for Louisiana and highlights our efforts to protect taxpayer dollars, deter fraud and punish those that cheat our Medicaid program," said Attorney General Caldwell. "We believe our efforts will cause them to rethink their bad behavior."
Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary Kathy Kliebert said, "This serves as another example of how we are fighting against fraud when some drug companies seek to take advantage of our Medicaid program. It is our duty to prevent waste, fraud and abuse in our programs, and we will continue working to help protect taxpayer dollars from fraudulent activity. In doing so, we'll ensure that our Medicaid recipients get the medications they need and that our providers are reimbursed fairly."
Five pharmaceutical manufacturers--Allergan, Covidien, United Research Laboratories, Merck, and Pfizer-recently agreed to pay Louisiana a combined total of $38,850,000 million for misrepresenting drug price information in order to defraud Louisiana's Medicaid program. That amount is in addition to last week's announced $45 million that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) agreed to pay Louisiana for the fraudulent marketing of Avandia and other GSK products.
The first trial for unresolved drug price violators is scheduled to commence on Monday, August 5 before Judge Wilson Fields of the 19th Judicial District Court. The case number is 596164.