A federal court has signed off on a $700 million class-action settlement that will see drug manufacturers and distributors pay more than 1,000 acute care hospitals over alleged misconduct regarding prescription opioids.
The deal consolidates four class-action settlements involving, among other defendants, Cencora (formerly AmerisourceBergen), Cardinal Health, McKesson, Johnson & Johnson, Teva and Allergan.
The defendants, the lawsuit alleged, either misrepresented the risks and safety of prescription opioid use, didn’t properly handle suspicious orders or filled prescriptions not written for legitimate medical purposes. The settling defendants deny any wrongdoing.
The companies agreed to pay $651 million in compensation “for the past and future costs for treatment of opioid abuse and community outreach programs to address the epidemic” plus another $49 million toward the supply of Naloxone for hospitals over the next seven years, according to a release from the settlement class counsel team. The counsel said it plans to request about a third of the total as compensation.
The class eligible for settlement payments, broadly speaking, consists of nongovernment acute care hospitals that treated patients with an opioid-related condition between Jan. 1, 2009, through Oct. 30, 2024, according to court documents and a website set up for the settlement. To qualify, hospitals needed to make a claim for payment by March 4.
Hospitals that submitted a valid claim had the option of a $5,000 “Quick Pay” or could have submitted more detailed documentation regarding the care provided and gotten reimbursed for a higher payment.
Court documents outline a “non-exhaustive” list of more than 1,000 acute care hospital class members. The settlement class counsel suggests that many more hospitals have been affected by the opioid epidemic.
“We’re very pleased these defendants recognized their responsibility to the thousands of acute care hospitals who have been on the front lines of the opioid epidemic for decades,” Warren Burns, of the law firm Burns Charest, who was an original attorney in the litigation and member of the settlement class counsel team, said in a release.
The settlement class counsel team is continuing to pursue similar settlements with other defendants, a group that includes Walgreens, CVS Pharmacy and Walmart.