A web of mail-order pharmacies, wholesalers and patient services groups connected to the self-styled largest Pentecostal denomination in the U.S. has been accused of defrauding pharma juggernaut Eli Lilly out of more than $200 million through a multi-year rebate scheme centered on the diabetes treatment Trulicity.
In a federal lawsuit filed in Miami this week, lawyers for Lilly accused the Florida-based mail-order pharmacy DrugPlace and multiple other companies—plus individually named defendants—of operating “under the guise of a massive ‘prescription cost share program’ for members of the Church of God in Christ.”
“Lilly brought this case to stop fraud and protect patients’ access to its medicines,” a company spokesperson told Fierce in an emailed statement.
“As alleged in the complaint, DrugPlace, Galaxy Pharmacy, and their co-conspirators submitted hundreds of thousands of rebate claims falsely representing that Trulicity had reached patients, when in reality they resold the medicine on the secondary market through affiliated wholesalers,” the spokesperson continued. “When the defendants learned that they had been discovered, DrugPlace shuttered its Nashville pharmacy and began liquidating assets—conduct consistent with covering its tracks.”
While the different entities targeted in the suit allegedly played distinct roles—such as church-affiliated payer, pharmacy benefit manager and exclusive pharmacy for participants in the program—the defendants “share overlapping ownership, control, and addresses,” Lilly argues in the lawsuit.
Moreover, the owners and principals of those companies—the individuals named in the lawsuit—have “previously been implicated in a lengthy string of healthcare fraud schemes,” according to the company’s complaint.
Lilly is asking the U.S. District Court for a temporary restraining order to prevent the scheme from carrying on. The company is also seeking “full restitution for unwarranted rebates” it paid out under the scheme, plus awards on profits it claims the defendants “unlawfully earned,” and damages.
While the Church of God in Christ is mentioned frequently in Lilly’s filing, the church is not named directly as a defendant. Nevertheless, it released an official statement this week defending itself and confirming that several parties named in the lawsuit are “affiliated with our church.”
“The Church of God in Christ has no knowledge of the acts alleged in the complaint,” the statement reads. “The Church has not knowingly participated in, authorized, or condoned any of the alleged fraudulent activity described in the lawsuit.”
Lilly has accused the companies and individuals involved in the scheme of purchasing “enormous quantities” of Trulicity through DrugPlace-affiliated pharmacies in Florida and Tennessee, after which they allegedly seek rebates from Lilly and filter those claims “through a series of intermediaries.” Lilly claims that in reality, the companies aren't dispensing “anything near the volume of Trulicity that they claim” to patients, describing the “vast majority” of prescribing and use stats from the companies as “fictional.”
Instead, according to Lilly’s legal team, DrugPlace and its compatriots are reselling Lilly’s diabetes drug to pharmaceutical wholesalers on the secondary market.
Lilly suggested that the scheme has defrauded it out of more than $200 million and asserted that the companies it’s suing are “similarly defrauding other pharmaceutical manufacturers as well,” without naming specific drugmakers.
Before the current version of the rebate and resale scheme, Lilly had a “direct contractual relationship with DrugPlace,” which the pharma giant says it ended after identifying “significant” concerns with its partner’s prescription-level and rebate data.
Nevertheless, DrugPlace and its allies managed “to conceal their rebate fraud scheme for years by submitting claims through intermediaries, which obscured the source of the claims, and by repeatedly pivoting to different intermediaries,” Lilly’s lawsuit states.
DrugPlace, operating as one company out of its Florida and Tennessee locations, claims to be a mail-order pharmacy and pharmacy benefit manager for a cost share program operated by a separate defendant, Community Health, according to Lilly. For its part, Community Health asserts that it’s an affiliated entity of the Church of God in Christ responsible for “recruiting patients and administering the church’s prescription cost share program,” according to Lilly’s lawsuit.
First approved in Type 2 diabetes in 2014, Trulicity is no longer the major sales driver for Lilly that it once was, as the company’s GIP/GLP-1 drug tirzepatide has taken center stage in the same indication, plus obesity.
While still driving blockbuster sales, returns from Trulicity have been on the decline in recent years, falling (PDF) to $2.9 billion in 2025 in the U.S., down from $3.369 billion in 2024 and $5.4 billion the year before that in Lilly’s home market.