TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — Eight drugmakers are being sued by a consumer advocacy group that alleges their programs offering coupons to reduce copayments for brand-name medicines are illegal.
|Community Catalyst alleges that the couponing programs violate federal bribery laws because they're meant to conceal information about the payments from health insurance plans.
|Such coupons generally reduce patient copayments for brand-name drugs to what they would pay for a generic drug. The group says that drives up health insurance premiums and can cause patients to reach benefit caps quicker.
|The companies sued are Abbott, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis and Pfizer. They did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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