A Wisconsin couple is demanding Walgreens and a pharmacy benefit management company, claiming that their son died because he could not afford a sudden increase of $ 500 in his asthma medicine.

Shanon and William Schmidtknecht, from Poynette, filed their claim in a federal court in Milwaukee on January 21, a year until the day his son Cole died at age 22.

According to demand, Cole Schmidtknecht suffered from asthma all his life. He handled it with daily doses of inhaler of the medication disk and its generic equivalents.

He stopped at a Walgreens pharmacy in Appleton on January 10, 2024, to fill his recipe and told him that the cost had increased from $ 66 to $ 539 in his pocket. Unable to pay the new cost, he left the pharmacy without the medicine. He tried to handle his condition with his rescue inhaler, but suffered a fatal asthma attack days later, according to demand.

The Schmidtknechts claim that the Optumrx Pharmacy Benefit Management Company violated Wisconsin’s law by increasing the cost of the medication without a valid medical reason and not providing 30 days of early warning of the price increases of medications.

Pharmacy benefits managers act as intermediaries between health insurance companies, prescribed pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies. Optum RX Recipe services for more than 66 million people in the United States, according to demand.

The demand alleges that Walgreens pharmacy employees did not offer Cole any solution to obtain their usual medicine. They told him that there were no cheaper alternatives or generic medicines available, they did not communicate with Optumrx to request an exception in the name of Cole, and they did not ask the school doctor to request an exception, their parents maintain.

Demand seeks unspecified damage.

“The conduct of Optumrx and Walgreens was deplorable,” said one of the family’s lawyers, Michael Trunk, in a statement. “The evidence in this case will show that both Optumrx and Walgreens put profits first, and are directly responsible for Cole’s death.”

The Optumrx spokesmen did not immediately respond to Wednesday’s messages looking for comments. In a statement last April that extended sympathy to the family, the company said that a review of Cole’s statements showed that the day he visited the pharmacy, bought a different asthma medicine, generic albuterol, for a $ cup of a glass 5 in January. 10 – A medication that says that he also obtained in October 2023. His case was managed “according to the practice of industry and the design of the patient insurance plan,” said the company.

However, Trunk said Wednesday that the generic recipe of $ 5 that Cole filled was for his rescue inhaler, not the Avair Diskus inhaler who took daily. He said Cole could not fill his prescription of Diskus to Advair because suddenly he had become too expensive.

Walgreens officials did not immediately respond to an email on Wednesday in search of comments on demand.

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Topics Wisconsin demands