Focus for 2019: addressing opioids, rising utility costs and fighting for accessible, affordable health care
FRANKFORT, Ky. (Dec. 10, 2018) – At the close of 2018, eight of the nine lawsuits Attorney General Andy Beshear has filed against pharmaceutical companies on behalf of Kentucky families and communities remain before a state judge in a Kentucky community.
To date, every one of the companies’ attempts to dismiss Beshear’s lawsuits has failed, and Beshear said his focus going forward will be to move the cases toward trial as quickly as possible.
“The only way to hold these out-of-state pharmaceutical companies accountable for the harm they have caused our families and communities is to haul them into our courts and make them pay for creating the crisis of our time – our opioid epidemic,” Beshear said. “While we can never bring back a loved one who lost their life to addiction, making these companies face a Kentucky jury can give our families a piece of justice and give our state the money it needs to rebuild our communities.”
The lawsuits allege the companies profited off the people of Kentucky as they fueled widespread addiction and caused fatal overdoses throughout the Commonwealth. Because of the statewide impact, Beshear filed his nine lawsuits, the majority of them in 2018, in eight counties – Boone, Fayette, Floyd, Franklin, Hardin, Jefferson Madison and McCracken. (Two lawsuits are filed in Franklin County.)
Beshear has sued AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Insys, Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen; Mallinckrodt, McKesson Corporation, Teva and Walgreens.
Kentucky now leads the nation in the number of individual opioid lawsuits filed by an attorney general. Kentuckians may track the progress of each case by visiting ag.ky.gov.
Another fight ahead of Beshear in 2019 is against an unprecedented number of investor-owned utility rate cases before the Public Service Commission (PSC).
Over the last three years, Beshear has opposed dozens of utility bill hikes, and has helped save Kentucky businesses and families nearly $1.2 billion.
But he said there are more proposed rate hikes on the horizon at a time when Kentucky families can least afford them.
“Kentuckians make less, and their wages go up slower than most of the nation,” Beshear said. “We live in a state that lost more than 2,000 jobs in October and lags behind the southern region and nation in employment growth.”
He said this trend coupled with utility rate hikes is causing Kentucky families to choose between putting food on the table or paying their utility bills.
The proposed total impact of these current cases before the PSC would mean a nearly $200 million annual rate increase for Kentuckians in about 90 counties. The five cases Beshear’s office is intervening in are Atmos Energy, Duke Energy, Kentucky American Water, Kentucky Utilities, and Louisville Gas and Electric.
Child safety remained a focus of Beshear’s in 2018 when his office rescued 12 child victims as part of online predator crackdowns that lead to more than 300 counts of child sexual abuse or child pornography charges against those arrested. In each of the rescue cases, the alleged predator had direct access to a child, Beshear said.
Beshear’s office secured a record 39 human trafficking and other related offenses arrests in 2018. One case resulted in the 20-year conviction of former Northern Kentucky school board member and judge Timothy Nolan. Nolan was prosecuted by Beshear’s Special Prosecutions Unit, which had a 33-percent increase in court appearances in 2018 over the previous year.
Currently, Beshear’s office is working 31 active human trafficking cases.
In further protecting victims, Beshear’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative or SAKI Cold Case Unit worked with McCracken County prosecutors and local law enforcement in August to indict a 45-year-old Louisville man in an alleged 2005 sexual assault of a minor. Beshear said Kentuckians will see even more DNA evidence from Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence or SAFE kit matches result in indictments statewide in 2019.
In 2018, Beshear’s office received federal money passed through the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet to fund a victims’ advocate for victim services in Marshall County where a deadly school shooting occurred in January.
In offering consumer services, more than $1.7 million was returned to Kentuckians, mainly seniors, from Beshear’s office in 2018. His office held 87 scam events to help raise awareness of the dangers of con artists.
Beshear’s office took action against numerous national, regional or local companies for unfair or misleading business practices including national ride sharing company Uber, a Shelbyville travel agency and a Hardin County wedding venue.
Efforts by Beshear’s office through civil settlements and criminal restitution in 2018 resulted in $11 million in obligations to state and federal health care programs, and his office returned nearly $1 million to the Commonwealth’s General Fund.
There was movement in one of the state’s longest ongoing gas price-gouging cases. In Kentucky’s 2007 case against Marathon Petroleum, Beshear’s office received a judge’s ruling in 2018 allowing them to depose the company’s CEO in late November. Beshear, whose office was in court 15 times in 2018 on this case, is taking it to trial in June 2019.
Two other areas of work for Beshear in 2018 included public pensions and public health care.
In April, Beshear filed litigation to protect the pensions of public employees against lawmakers’ 2018 pension bill, Senate Bill 151. The case is currently before the Supreme Court of Kentucky.
In the area of health care, Beshear’s office is participating in three national lawsuits to ensure that health insurance companies cannot discriminate against Kentuckians with preexisting conditions.
“We proved over the last year that we are still fighting to maintain our top priorities for the people of Kentucky,” Beshear said. “Our goal for the year ahead is to continue to lay the groundwork for these programs so that every community across the state has the support of the attorney general’s office.”
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