Deadline for claims in the $125 Million settlement of the AWP litigation is this week!

You may be eligible for payment if you received a physician-administered drug between January 1, 1991 and January 1, 2005 for the treatment of different types of cancer, HIV, allergies, infections, inflammation, pain, gastrointestinal problems and lung and blood issues. The following 200 prescription drugs, listed at http://awptrack2settlement.com/pdfs/Class_A_%20and_Class_B_Drug_List.pdf were usually, but not always, administered in doctor’s offices (i.e. usually through injections or IVs).

You are eligible to file a claim for a reimbursement from the settlemen if you paid a percentage co-payment for any of these 200 drugs. This includes both people on Medicare Part B (who should have received a yellow post card in the mail) and people not on Medicare (who need to file a claim form that can be downloaded from the settlement website at http://awptrack2settlement.com/index.htm or requested by calling 877-465-8136.)

Your claim form must be postmarked or received by this Saturday, January 31, 2009.

A spouse of a deceased consumer who made such a co-payment or a legal representative of a deceased consumer’s estate may file a claim in the place of the deceased consumer.

The payments are the result of a $125 million settlement that dealt with consumers being over-charged for the prescription drugs. Back in September, 2008, Prescription Access Litigation reported that 11 defendant pharmaceutical drug manufacturers in the In re Pharmaceutical Industry Average Wholesale Price Litigation lawsuit had agreed to settle the case for $125 million. The lawsuit alleged that several dozen drug companies illegally inflated the price of these and other prescription drugs.

Details of the settlement, claim forms, and information on how to file a claim can be found at http://awptrack2settlement.com/index.htm or by calling 877-465-8136.

Further information on the lawsuit is available at http://www.prescriptionaccess.org/lawsuitssettlements/current_lawsuits?id=0005.

PAL extends and enthusiastic welcome to Voluntary Hospitals House Staff Benefits Plan (VHHSBP), Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR), SEIU Healthcare to our Coalition. Voluntary Hospitals House Staff Benefits Plan, is a union health and welfare fund that provides medical and prescription benefits to approximately 8,000 members (and their families) of the Committee of Interns and Residents who work in a group of hospitals in the New York City area. CIR is the largest housestaff union in the country, representing more than 13,000 residents in California, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. CIR contracts improve housestaff salaries and working conditions as well as enhance the quality of patient care. CIR was founded in 1957. In May, 1997, CIR affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which now has 2 million members and over 1 million healthcare workers all over the country.

The Prescription Access Litigation coalition has more than 130 organizational members that represent over 13 million individuals. The coalition includes consumer advocacy organizations, senior citizen groups, health care advocacy groups, labor unions, union benefit funds, nonprofit health plans, and others. PAL coalition members join class action lawsuits, help get the word out about new lawsuits and settlements, and participate in advocacy campaigns to curtail runaway drug marketing and unethical drug pricing. If your organization is interested in joining the PAL coalition, learn more here.

As we reported last month in “Unions in PAL Coalition win $350 Million settlement in McKesson class action,” PAL coalition members AFSCME District Council 37 Health and Security Plan and New England Carpenters Benefits Fund were among the plaintiffs who helped achieve the historic settlement with McKesson.

The good folks at AFSCME DC 37 have their own newspaper, Public Employee Press, which goes to several hundred thousand DC 37 members and others in New York City. In the December 2008 issue, PEP, as it’s known, ran an article on the McKesson settlement. DC 37′s cartoonist has a knack for boiling down hundreds of pages into a single image.

Here are the two cartoons that accompanied the article about the McKesson settlement.

The first summarizes the case against McKesson, showing McKesson as a giant pill holding up consumers, with a “gun” labelled Rx. Note: While the bag of money says “$350 million,” the case alleged that the monetary damages of consumers and health plans were much higher. $350 million represents what McKesson is willing to pay to settle.

The second shows the DC 37 “cop on the beat” taking the McKesson pill into custody.

Here’s the full text of the article that ran in PEP about the case:

The McKesson Corp. has agreed to pay $350 million to settle a lawsuit brought by DC 37 and others who charged the drug wholesaler with illegally inflating the price of members’ medications.

In November, McKesson agreed to settle the case, which accused the firm of fixing prices in 2001 and 2002. The proceeds — including millions of dollars in damages for the DC 37 Health and Security Plan — will go to health plans and consumers.

In the 2006 suit, the DC 37 plan and a group of plaintiffs charged that McKesson conspired to fraudulently inflate the prices of more than 400 prescription drugs by manipulating price information published by First DataBank. The suit was filed under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and the settlement is one of the largest of its type.

“DC 37 is fighting a huge battle to provide quality prescription drug coverage for our members,” said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts. “It doesn’t help when those in the industry make it more difficult by rigging the system.”

First DataBank settled quickly, but McKesson, whose annual revenues top $500 billion, refused to settle until now.

McKesson was charged with creating the price-fixing scheme to benefit key retail clients who might otherwise have purchased wholesale prescriptions from its competitors. The lawsuits charged that the McKesson/First DataBank scheme raised the markup on hundreds of brand-name drugs from 20 percent to 25 percent.

DC 37 and three other union members of Prescription Access Litigation, a nationwide coalition of more than 120 senior, labor and consumer health advocacy groups that is fighting to make prescription drugs more affordable, participated in the lawsuit.

DC 37 Health and Security Plan Administrator Cynthia Chin-Marshall said the plan expects compensation in the settlement “for the millions of dollars in inflated prices we’ve been forced to pay.”

“Hopefully we have taught the drug industry a lesson and they will refrain from fixing prices in the future,” said Audrey A. Browne, the plan’s director of regulatory compliance.