Once again, a big drugmaker has made a payment to a state in order to settle charges of inflating the average wholesale prices of its medicine. This time, AstraZeneca agreed to pay $2.5 million to Idaho, which argued its citizens were harmed because the state Medicaid program unnecessarily paid too much for various drugs. “Where published prices are false or misleading, the taxpayers are significantly harmed by excessive Medicaid reimbursements,” Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden says in a statement. “Investigation by my office has revealed that the reported average wholesale price often is not related to the actual wholesale price paid for the drug.”
