Supreme Court Holds that “Pay-To-Delay” Deals Can Violate Antitrust Laws
ATTORNEY: ADAM G. KURTZ
POMERANTZ MONITOR, JULY/AUGUST 2013
Last fall, we wrote about how brand name drug manufacturers have been paying large amounts of money to generic drug makers to induce them to delay bringing low-cost generic drugs to market. For years prior to this recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, many federal courts have refused to declare these pay-to-delay payments anti-competitive, or even subject them to the antitrust laws.
On June 17, 2013, in a case involving the testosterone supplement Androgel, the U.S. Supreme Court handed healthcare consumers and union health and welfare funds a victory. Androgel, a treatment for low testosterone, had sales of $1 billion a year. It has no competition from generic alternatives. If there were generic competition, sales of the branded version would probably drop by 75% and its manufacturer, Solvay, would lose approximately $125 million in profits a year. To postpone generic competition, Solvay paid the generic company, Actavis, as much as $42 million a year to delay their competing generic version of Androgel until 2015.
The Supreme Court ruled, 5-3, that such pay-to-delay deals are, in fact, subject to the antitrust laws. This is truly a big win, given the amount of healthcare costs involved. There were 40 such deals this past year alone, and they cost American consumers $3.5 billion a year in higher drug costs. The Androgel decision may not end pay-for-delay deals, but they will now be subject to the antitrust scrutiny.
The legal arguments addressed by the Supreme Court were complicated and involved a clash between the antitrust and patent laws. On the one hand, the antitrust laws state that two competing companies cannot agree that one of them will stay out of the market. That is, the branded and generic company cannot agree to keep drug prices high by delaying introduction of a generic drug into the market.
On the other hand, the patent laws give a company with a valid patent the right to exclude a competitor with a product that violates the patent. That is, a branded company can exclude a generic drug as long as the branded company had a valid patent. Pay-to-delay deals are part of a settlement in a patent infringement lawsuit, brought by the brand name manufacturer, alleging that the generic drug maker is violating the brand name patent. Settlements are generally encouraged as a good thing.
In the end, the Supreme Court chose antitrust law over patent law and healthcare consumers over pharmaceutical companies in holding that, settlement or not, these deals can be struck down if they violate the antitrust laws.
For years, Pomerantz – on behalf of health care consumers – and the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) have been fighting against pay-to-delay deals, arguing that they are anti-competitive and violate the antitrust laws. In fact, Pomerantz is co-lead counsel, on behalf of a putative end-payor class, in the companion case to the recently decided U.S. Supreme Court case, which is currently pending in the Northern District of Georgia. Now that the Supreme Court has agreed that pay-to-delay deals are not immune from the antitrust laws, Pomerantz will continue to represent vigorously our union health and welfare fund clients who end up paying unlawful supra-competitive prices for branded drugs as a result of these deals.