Wal­greens asks fed­er­al court to toss Hu­mana's $642M pay­out in drug pric­ing case

Wal­greens pe­ti­tioned a fed­er­al court on Fri­day to toss Hu­mana’s $642 mil­lion ar­bi­tra­tion award in a squab­ble over pre­scrip­tion drug prices, ar­gu­ing that “no or­di­nary read­er of the con­tract at is­sue would find that Wal­greens had done any­thing wrong.”

Hu­mana filed an ar­bi­tra­tion de­mand in 2019, ac­cus­ing Wal­greens of a decade plus-long scheme to over­charge the com­pa­ny and its mem­bers through “un­law­ful­ly in­flat­ed” prices on pre­scrip­tion drugs, ac­cord­ing to doc­u­ments filed with the DC court last week. The is­sue stems from Wal­greens’ Pre­scrip­tion Sav­ings Club, a phar­ma­cy pro­gram de­signed to help unin­sured or un­der­in­sured pa­tients to ac­cess low­er prices. In fil­ing re­im­burse­ment claims to Hu­mana, the phar­ma­cy chain re­port­ed the stan­dard re­tail prices as its “usu­al and cus­tom­ary” (U&C) prices, not the spe­cial rates.

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