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Column: A Trump judge slaps down Big Pharma's attack on Biden's drug price cuts
The pharmaceutical industry’s all-out attack on President Biden’s drug negotiation initiative for Medicare — comprising nine federal lawsuits (so far) and lots of heavy breathing by lobbyists — has just run into a major snag.
That it came from a judge appointed by Donald Trump is just one of its man-bites-dog aspects. Another is the forceful skepticism expressed by a federal judge in normally business-friendly Delaware in his ruling, issued March 1 against the British drugmaker AstraZeneca.
“Understandably, drug manufacturers like AstraZeneca don’t like the IRA,” wrote Judge Colm F. Connolly, referring to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which authorized Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers over how much it would pay for prescription drugs taken by its enrollees.
No one is entitled to sell the Government drugs at prices the Government won’t agree to pay.
— Federal Judge Colm F. Connolly
“Lower prices mean lower profits,” Connolly continued. “Drug manufacturers like AstraZeneca desire the old pricing regime, and they lobbied and perhaps expected Congress not to pass the IRA in 2022.”
However, he wrote, “No one is entitled to sell the Government drugs at prices the Government won’t agree to pay.”
Connolly tossed out the lawsuit by granting the government summary judgment. His opinion has no sway over the federal judges hearing the other lawsuits, which have been brought by Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Novo Nordisk, Bristol Myers Squibb, Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim, the industry lobbying arm Phrma and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
But his opinion can serve as a window into how the other judges might view those lawsuits, most of which bear such strong resemblance to AstraZeneca’s that they might all have been spit out by ChatGPT if it were asked to draft any industry lawsuit over any distasteful government regulation.
That makes it a useful counterbalance to the claims in those cases, which I earlier described as “windows into the mind of Big Pharma, revealing the industry’s grotesque level of entitlement and its cynical exploitation of Americans’ desire for better healthcare in order to claim profits well beyond the level that any thinking person would consider moral.” Those cases have been filed in federal courts in Ohio, New Jersey and the District of Columbia.
So let’s take a closer look. First, a word about the judge. He doesn’t appear to be cut from the same cloth as some Trump-appointed judges who have given the federal judiciary something of a bozoid flavor, such as James Ho of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans or Matthew Kaczmarek of the Northern District of Texas, sitting in Amarillo, who have riled the legal system with extreme right-wing rulings.
A former U.S. attorney in Delaware under George W. Bush, Connolly is the chief judge of his district. His ruling in the AstraZeneca case comes as a meticulously researched analysis of the issues and the legal background. That doesn’t mean it will stand up as higher courts ponder AstraZeneca’s inevitable appeal.
A quick primer on the IRA’s Medicare negotiation initiative will be useful here. This implemented a long-cherished idea of drug price reformers, which is to give Medicare, the largest buyer of prescription drugs, the right to dicker over prices with drugmakers, overcoming a prohibition that Congress imposed on Medicare in 2003, when it created Medicare’s Part D prescription drug benefit.
The negotiation system also applies to drugs administered to patients under Medicare Part B, which typically are administered in hospitals or doctors’ offices, not at home. Medicaid can also benefit from price cuts reached through the Medicare process. Here’s how it works:
In September, the Department of Health and Human Services compiled a list of 10 branded, non-generic drugs from the roster of those on which Medicare spends the most; 30 more drugs will be added in 2025 and 2026, and more in subsequent years.
Drug companies have 30 days after the selection to agree to negotiations on a price, which must be at least a 25% to 60% discount from a drug’s average price on the non-federal market. For the first round, the negotiation process will last through July, with prices to take effect in 2026.
Companies that refuse to participate in this process or reject Medicare’s designation of a “fair” price will be subject to an excise tax starting at 65% of a drug’s U.S. sales and rising over time to 95%. To avoid the penalty, those companies have the option of pulling out of Medicare and Medicaid entirely.
AstraZeneca filed its lawsuit in August 2023. That was before HHS named the first 10 drugs to be negotiated, so the company couldn’t assume it would be directly affected by the program.
But it plainly had an inkling that its diabetes and kidney disease drug Farxiga would be on the list, because Medicare was spending about $3.3 billion a year to provide it to about 800,000 patients, so it mentioned the drug in its legal complaint, almost in passing. When Farxiga indeed was named as one of the first 10 drugs, the company amended its complaint with a three-word change to bring it up to date. About a week later, the company agreed to participate in the negotiation process, though it continued to pursue the lawsuit. I believe this is known in courthouse corridors as “hedging your bets.”
In its lawsuit, AstraZeneca asserts that the negotiation process hurts it in several ways — assertions aimed at showing that the company suffered concrete injuries from the IRA, the threshold established by the Constitution for allowing lawsuits to be heard in federal court — the principle known as “standing.”
The company claimed that the government’s plan to treat all permutations of a drug, including the conditions it can be used to treat, as a single drug will sap it of the incentive to search for new uses, “which in turn will narrow patient access to new treatments.” It also said that its “decision-making about other drugs” will be affected by the government’s negotiation rules, in part because how the negotiations will unfold is so uncertain “we don’t know the impact” of the process “on our ability to negotiate.”
Connolly found both claims to be too vague to give AstraZeneca standing. In any event, he wrote, AstraZeneca plainly does know how the negotiations will be conducted, since it described the process in detail in its 44-page legal complaint and 100 pages of briefs.
“The only uncertainty,” Connolly found, “comes from the filing of this lawsuit,” which calls for the IRA to be found unconstitutional. That won’t do, he observed. “A plaintiff,” he wrote, “cannot create standing to file a suit by filing the suit.”
The meat of AstraZeneca’s case is its contention that the negotiation provision of the IRA represents government coercion — that the threat of penalizing drugmakers with steep taxes for not coming to the negotiating table is tantamount to “a gun to the head.”
Connolly dismissed that out of hand by pointing to a flaw in the argument remarked on by other legal experts: For drug companies, selling their products to Medicare is an entirely voluntary choice. No law requires them to participate.
It’s true, as he noted, that by commanding 40% of the prescription drug market in the U.S. — nearly 50%, including Medicaid — Medicare is a customer crucial, perhaps even indispensable, to every drug company’s business model.
But here’s the trade-off: Reaching the 49 million Medicare and Medicaid members provides an incentive that the government is fully within its rights to use to extract better prices from the manufacturers. There’s “nothing sinister” about it, Connolly wrote.
He’s right, of course. It’s not as if drug companies themselves haven’t used their monopoly rights over blockbuster drugs to demand parasitic prices for those products. That’s the impulse, after all, that drove Gilead Sciences in 2015 to demand $100,000 per treatment for Harvoni, its miracle cure for hepatitis C, when it could have made a healthy profit at half that price, or less. AstraZeneca, by the way, reported an operating profit of $14.5 billion in its 2023 fiscal year on revenue of nearly $46 billion.
Aware that Connolly’s ruling might be used as a road map by the judges hearing the other drug industry lawsuits, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra made sure that it was entered into the record in the other courts. One can expect the other plaintiffs to do what they can to distinguish their claims from AstraZeneca’s.
Merck, which was the first to sue to overturn the IRA, responded promptly. On Monday, it notified the judge in its case that it “does not assert a right to sell its drugs to Medicare at a market price; rather, it asserts a right not to be compelled to sell its drugs to Medicare at the government-dictated price.” (Emphasis Merck’s.)
To non-lawyers, this may seem to cut the baloney mighty thin. To lawyers, perhaps it cuts to the essence of the case. One way or another, it’s a signal that the pharmaceutical industry isn’t about to give up. Why would it, with billions of dollars at stake, never mind access to life-giving drugs for millions of Americans.
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By Ben Casselman, Nour Idriss, Sutton Raphael and Stephanie Swart
April 18, 2026
Nearly two years after actor Alec Baldwin was cleared of criminal charges in the “Rust” movie shooting death, a long simmering civil negligence case is inching toward a trial this fall.
On Friday, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge denied a summary judgment motion requested by the film producers Rust Movie Productions LLC, as well as actor-producer Baldwin and his firm El Dorado Pictures to dismiss the case.
During a hearing, Superior Court Judge Maurice Leiter set an Oct. 12 trial date.
The negligence suit was brought more than four years ago by Serge Svetnoy, who served as the chief lighting technician on the problem-plagued western film. Svetnoy was close friends with cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and held her in his arms as she lay dying on the floor of the New Mexico movie set. Baldwin’s firearm had discharged, launching a .45 caliber bullet, which struck and killed her.
The Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe, N.M. in 2021.
(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)
Svetnoy was the first crew member of the ill-fated western to bring a lawsuit against the producers, alleging they were negligent in Hutchins’ October 2021 death. He maintains he has suffered trauma in the years since. In addition to negligence, his lawsuit also accuses the producers of intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Prosecutors dropped criminal charges against Baldwin, who has long maintained he was not responsible for Hutchins’ death.
“We are pleased with the Court’s decision denying the motions for summary judgment filed by Rust Movie Productions and Mr. Baldwin,” lawyers Gary Dordick and John Upton, who represent Svetnoy, said in a statement following the hearing. “He looks forward to finally having his day in court on this long-pending matter.”
The judge denied the defendants’ request to dismiss the negligence, emotional distress and punitive damages claims. One count directed at Baldwin, alleging assault, was dropped.
Svetnoy has said the bullet whizzed past his head and “narrowly missed him,” according to the gaffer’s suit.
Attorneys representing Baldwin and the producers were not immediately available for comment.
Svetnoy and Hutchins had been friends for more than five years and worked together on nine film productions. Both were immigrants from Ukraine, and they spent holidays together with their families.
On Oct. 21, 2021, he was helping prepare for an afternoon of filming in a wooden church on Bonanza Creek Ranch. Hutchins was conversing with Baldwin to set up a camera angle that Hutchins wanted to depict: a close-up image of the barrel of Baldwin’s revolver.
The day had been chaotic because Hutchins’ union camera crew had walked off the set to protest the lack of nearby housing and previous alleged safety violations with the firearms on the set.
Instead of postponing filming to resolve the labor dispute, producers pushed forward, crew members alleged.
New Mexico prosecutors prevailed in a criminal case against the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez, in March 2024. She served more than a year in a state women’s prison for her involuntary manslaughter conviction before being released last year.
Baldwin faced a similar charge, but the case against him unraveled spectacularly.
On the second day of his July 2024 trial, his criminal defense attorneys — Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro — presented evidence that prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies withheld evidence that may have helped his defense . The judge was furious, setting Baldwin free.
Variety first reported on Friday’s court action.
The highest gas prices in the country are making it tougher for some gig drivers to make a living.
Gas prices have shot up amid the war in the Middle East. On average, California gas prices are the most expensive in the United States, according to data from the American Automobile Assn. The average price of regular gas in California is almost $6. The national average is a little above $4.
While Uber and Lyft drivers have concocted clever ways to cut gas consumption, they say that without some relief they will be forced to leave the ride-hailing business.
John Mejia was already struggling to make money as a part-time Lyft driver when soaring gas prices made his side hustle even harder.
“Unfortunately, it’s the economics of paying less to drivers and gas prices,” he said. “It actually is pulling people out of the business.”
Guests at The Westin St. Francis hotel get into an Uber.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Gig work offers drivers the freedom to work for themselves and more flexibility, but being independent contractors also means they must shoulder unexpected costs.
Ride-sharing companies say they’re trying to help, but drivers say the gas relief comes with caveats. For now, drivers say they’re being pickier about what rides they accept, cutting hours and are looking at other ways to make money.
Mejia, who started driving for Lyft more than a decade ago, said in his early days, he would sometimes make $400 in three hours. Now it takes 12 hours to rake in $200.
The San Francisco Bay Area consultant is an active member of the California Gig Workers Union, so he knows he isn’t alone. California has more than 800,000 gig rideshare drivers, according to the group, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union.
On social media sites such as Reddit and Facebook, gig workers have posted about how the higher gas prices are eating into their earnings. Among the tricks they are suggesting: reducing the number of times the ignition is turned on or off, avoiding traffic, working in specific neighborhoods and at times with high demand and switching to electric vehicles.
Gig drivers usually have only seconds to decide whether to accept a ride on the app, but they have become more strategic about which rides and deliveries they accept.
That means they are more likely to sit back in their cars and wait for higher fares for quick pick-up and drop-off.
“I highly recommend the ‘decline and recline’ strategy, rejecting unprofitable rides until a better one appears,” wrote Sergio Avedian, a driver, in the popular blog the Rideshare Guy.
Pedestrians cross the street in front of a Lyft and Uber driver on Wednesday. High gas prices have made it hard for gig drivers to make a living, cutting into their profits.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Uber, Lyft and other companies have unveiled several ways to help drivers save on gas.
Uber said drivers can get up to 15% cash back through May 26 with the Uber Pro card, a business debit Mastercard for drivers and couriers. Based on a worker’s tier, they can get up to $1 off per gallon of gas through Upside — an app that offers cash rewards — and up to 21 cents off per gallon of gas with Shell Fuel Rewards. The company also offers incentives for drivers who want to switch to electric vehicles.
“We know the price of gas is top of mind for many rideshare and delivery drivers across the country right now,” Uber said in a blog post about its gas savings efforts.
Lyft also said it’s expanding gas relief through May 26 because the company knows that the extra cost “hits hardest for drivers who depend on driving for their income.”
The company is offering more cash back, depending on the driver’s tier, for drivers who use a Lyft Direct business debit card to pay for gas at eligible gas stations. They can get an additional 14 cents per gallon off through Upside.
Drivers say the fine print on the offers dictates which card they use and where they fill up gas, making it difficult for them to save money.
“If I do the math, it’s ridiculous,” Mejia said. “They’re offering us nothing.”
Uber declined to comment, but pointed to its blog post about the gas relief efforts. Lyft also referenced the blog post and said “the gas savings were structured through rewards to maximize stackable opportunities.”
Guests at The Westin St. Francis hotel get into an Uber.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Gig workers have struggled with rising gas prices in the past.
In 2022, Lyft and Uber temporarily added a surcharge to their fares amid record-high gas prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This year, Uber is adding a fuel charge to its fares in Australia for roughly two months to offset the high cost of gas for drivers. Lyft said it hasn’t added a fuel charge in the U.S. or elsewhere.
Margarita Penalosa, who drives full time for Uber and Lyft in Los Angeles, started as a rideshare driver in 2017. Back then, gas was cheaper. She would easily hit her goal of making $300 in eight hours. Now she’s making just $250 after working as much as 14 hours.
Gas prices, she said, used to be less than $3 per gallon. Now some gas stations are charging more than $8 per gallon.
“Take out the gas. Take out the mileage from my car and maintenance. How much [do] I really make? Probably I get $11 for an hour,” she said.
Jonathan Tipton Meyers wants to spend fewer hours as a rideshare driver.
He already juggles multiple gigs even while driving for Uber and Lyft in Los Angeles. He’s a mobile notary and loan signing agent, a writer and performer.
Driving is “a very challenging, full-time job,” he said. “It’s very taxing and, of course, wages were just continually decreasing.”
John Mejia, a longtime Lyft and Uber driver, poses for a portrait before attending a meeting about unionizing gig drivers.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Even if oil continues to flow through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran reopened Friday, it could take a while for gas prices to come down to earth, said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
“There’s an old adage that prices rise like a rocket and fall like a feather,” he said. “I think that’ll apply.”
In the meantime, it will be survival of the fittest drivers. If enough of them decide to leave the apps, the ride-hailing companies could be forced to raise fares further to attract some back.
“Those who approach rideshare driving strategically, tracking expenses, choosing trips carefully, and optimizing efficiency are far more likely to weather periods of high gas prices,” wrote Avedian in the Rideshare Guy blog. “For everyone else, a spike at the pump can quickly turn rideshare driving from a side hustle into a money-losing venture.”
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