Loudon County Schools votes to j

The Loudon County Board of Education's monthly board meeting included an item that wasn’t initially on the Oct. 3 agenda: a vote to join a lawsuit.

Board members voted unanimously to join a lawsuit related to insulin overcharging. The board consists of recently-elected chair Bobby Johnson Jr., vice chair Scott Newman, Stephanie Hatcher, LaVonne Barbour, Andrew Disney, Kim Bridges, Lisa Harvey, Melissa Browder, Kenneth Presley and Zack Cusick, who attended the meeting by phone.

Chris McCarty, an attorney with Lewis Thomason and counsel for the county school system, is working on the litigation effort with the Frantz Law Group out of California. William Shinoff, Frantz Law Group’s lead counsel, explained what the case is focused on in an interview with The News-Herald.

“In 2021, the Senate Finance Committee came out with a report regarding insulin pricing, which showed that there is a price-gouging scheme going on by a number of insulin manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers that have financially impacted these self-funded health plans,” Shinoff said.

Because Loudon County has a self-funded health plan through the state — instead of a traditional, fully insured health plan where the insurance company pays for all the pharmacy benefits for those covered under their plan — Shinoff said the county has been impacted.

“(Self-funded health plans are) paying some 10 to 20 times the appropriate amount for diabetes medication, and so what we're trying to do in the litigation is recover the funds that these companies have overcharged over about a five-year period of time.”

Loudon County Schools will be one of a few hundred school systems and municipalities involved in the multi-district litigation that will be consolidated in federal court in New Jersey, Shinoff said. The complaint is in progress.

The defendants on the manufacturer's side are Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. On the pharmacy benefit manager's side, it's Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and OptumRx.

Frantz Law Group works on a contingency fee, Shinoff said. If there is no recovery in the case, Loudon County pays no attorney's fees and no cost.

If there is a recovery, the county pays a 30 percent fee, which Shinoff said is reduced from the traditional 40 or 50 percent.

“I run our public entity practice and we try to make sure that a majority of the funds end up going to the clients,” Shinoff said. “I make sure that we reduce our fees for our public entity clients.”