Posted by Michael Wonder on 20 Apr 2017
Meet the lawyer trying to pry drug pricing secrets out of Big Pharma
20 April 2017 - He has a private jet, a pedigree of winning billion-dollar settlements, and the (sometimes grudging) respect of his adversaries. Now, he wants to become pharma’s latest headache.
Class-action attorney Steve Berman is coming after a drug industry he says is “gouging” the American consumer. And his suits have the potential to crack the lid on the black box of drug pricing, shedding light on a secretive process that has sparked an escalating blame game between drug makers and the many middlemen in the US health care system.
Berman sees the drug pricing system as a Rube Goldberg machine for extracting money from patients: Pharma sets a high price for a given medication, and then promises a big, undisclosed rebate to the pharmacy benefit managers who control which drugs get covered by insurers. As prices go up, so too do the secret rebates. Berman’s conclusion: The big guys get richer, and the patients pay the price.
