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Morris & Dickson Co, one of the largest U.S. wholesale drug distributors, agreed to pay $22 million in civil penalties to settle U.S. government charges that it failed to report thousands of suspicious orders of the opioids hydrocodone and oxycodone...The...Louisiana-based company will also spend millions of dollars to hire staff and upgrade oversight to help comply with federal regulations requiring that orders be properly reported...Drug Enforcement Administration...since...2014 uncovered more than 12,000 retail pharmacy orders for hydrocodone and oxycodone that Morris & Dickson should have flagged to that agency...READ MORE

The U.S. Treasury Department...placed sanctions on Goldpharma, an Argentina-based network of online pharmacies that it said contributed to the opioid crisis by selling clandestinely produced narcotics to customers in the United States...The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also designated eight Argentine nationals and nine entities located in Argentina, Colombia, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands for their roles in Goldpharma...“The Goldpharma network illustrates the sophisticated tactics drug traffickers and money launderers use to capitalize on the Internet and online pharmacy sites to sell highly addictive illicit narcotics around the world,” said Sigal Mandelker, Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence...READ MORE

Novartis is looking to launch spinal muscular atrophy gene therapy Zolgensma this year. But the possibility of a price tag as high as $5 million has already sparked controversy. To prepare for the pricey rollout, CEO Vas Narasimhan is now calling for changes to the U.S. drug payment system...For chronic diseases, current healthcare systems are made in a “pay-as-you-go model,” but not for single-treatment therapies that could potentially cure them. And that makes new models for evaluating the benefits of such treatments and for payment necessary...“[W]e need new economic models to determine exactly how much value [a cure] represents” when compared with the cost and suffering saved from longtime chronic care...READ MORE

Laura Joszt, Managing Editor at The American Journal of Managed Care. Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

Governments are working on a drug pricing transparency deal at the World Health Organization’s annual assembly, but activists said...they fear crucial costs may be left out, enabling pharmaceutical firms to keep prices high...Campaigners say some drugs are exorbitantly priced, even though they are often developed with public funding, and health providers often pay far too much, since governments negotiate prices without knowing what the treatment cost to develop...A six-page draft published by the WHO on Thursday urges states to publish prices and costs of medicines, vaccines, cell and gene-based therapies and other health technologies, and improve the transparency of medical patents...Transparency campaigners said they feared that a handful of countries, including Germany and Britain, were trying to kill the resolution with “a thousand cuts”...READ MORE

The Australian subsidiaries of British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline and Swiss drugmaker Novartis misled customers and broke the law by promoting identical liniments as though they could treat specific ills, an Australian court found...The court said the companies admitted marketing Voltaren Osteo Gel as a treatment for osteoarthritis-related pain when its ingredients were the same as a cheaper Voltaren product, Emulgel...Judge Bromwich is yet to set a fine but the maximum penalty is the higher of A$10 million ($7 million), triple the benefit earned from the misleading conduct or - if that cannot be determined - a tenth of the annual turnover of the company in question...READ MORE

Laura Joszt, Managing Editor at The American Journal of Managed Care, welcome to the Pharmacy Times News Network,  Pharmacy Week in Review.

The National Community Pharmacists Association and the National Association of Chain Drug Stores issued a joint statement expressing their frustration at the release of HHS’s final drug pricing rule for Medicare and Medicaid. The final version of the rule fails to reform pharmacy direct and indirect remuneration fees...READ MORE

Samantha DiGrande, Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network