Insulin price lawsuit

In 2017, the Nevada Legislature enacted a new law requiring the collection of corporate information that tracks insulin pricing (“Healthy legislature,” RN&R, June 15, 2017). Now the Nevada Independent has sued to try to pry that information loose from state government hands.

The 2017 bill required insulin manufacturers to provide financial information, and drug lobbyists poured into the state to try to beat the bill. The original measure was sponsored by Democratic Sen. Yvanna Cancela and was killed by a veto by GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval. A weaker version of the bill was then revived under Republican sponsorship and approved by the governor.

The Independent reported that it filed two requests under Nevada’s public records law “seeking copies of annual reports submitted by diabetes drug companies and the drug pricing middlemen who help sell them to the state under the bipartisan transparency legislation, which aimed at targeting skyrocketing diabetes drugs prices. … But the state has denied much of both requests on the grounds that such information is exempt from state public records law because of a federal trade secret law.”