Cigna Unit Accused of Selling Generic Drugs at Higher Prices

Imagine Cigna is like a big company that helps decide how much medicine should cost and also sells some medicines itself.

Cigna has a smaller company called Quallent that puts its own label on generic drugs made by others and then sets a price for them.

A research group called 46brooklyn looked at these prices and said that the drugs Quallent sells are often more expensive than other places.

They used a special way to measure prices called AWP.

Cigna says this group is wrong and is using numbers in a tricky way.

They claim that Quallent tries to sell good quality drugs, and sometimes the cheapest ones aren't the best.

Cigna also says that many other companies are similar to Quallent.

The research group believes that companies like Cigna have a reason to make prices seem higher to earn more money.

Cigna says that health plans pay the same for these generic drugs as for others and that they are trying to move away from contracts based on the AWP system.