Lawmakers want answers from a drug maker that two years ago denied engaging in price fixing after two former executives were charged with allegedly doing that.
The Justice Department charged former executives with Heritage Pharmaceuticals earlier this week with price fixing the antibiotic doxycycline hyclate and another drug. The charges rankled Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who asked Heritage in 2014 about price fixing.
“If these allegations are true and Heritage executives sought to keep the price of doxycycline hyclate artificially high through price fixing and other anticompetitive arrangements, your company’s assertions to Congress now seem disingenuous at best,” according to a letter from the lawmakers to the New Jersey drug maker on Friday. The drug is an antibiotic that treats Lyme disease.
The Justice Department charged former Heritage CEO Jeffrey Glazer and former president Jason Malek for price fixing. Attorneys general from 20 states also issued their own criminal complaints.
Cummings and Sanders, who have investigated high drug prices before, sent a letter to Heritage in October 2014.
The company’s attorney denied there were any “significant price increases” for its doxycycline product in the U.S., according to the lawmakers’ letter.
The lawmakers asked for all communications around the time Heritage received their initial request for answers in 2014.
Cummings and Sanders have decried other price hikes by other drug makers, the latest being Mylan’s $600 price tag for a two-pack of the allergy drug EpiPen.
Heritage said the lawmakers’ request in 2014 was about a drug that it didn’t make. It never sold or made an immediate-release version of doxycycline, which was the subject of the 2014 letter, a company spokesman said.
Heritage had FDA approval to sell a delayed release version since 2013.
