Drug company agrees to pay up in price-fixing scheme

Iowa is winning more than a million-and-a-half dollars in a legal settlement with a prescription drug company. Bob Brammer, spokesman for the Iowa Attorney General, says Mylan Laboratories broke the law in creating a monopoly on a pair of drugs used to treat anxiety.Brammer says the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based company cornered the market, then raised the price on the drugs by two-thousand to three-thousand percent. Not only was that illegal, but Brammer says it’s unconscionable.as the drugs were often used in nursing homes and for hospice patients and people with Alzheimer’s Disease. The drug’s names are clorazepate and lorazepam.Brammer says Mylan has settled the suit and will make payments of about 100-million dollars to several states where the drugs were sold. Iowa’s share should be around one-point-six million dollars.