BILKED: Taxpayers may have overpaid by more than $1 billion for Mylan’s EpiPen, senator reveals.

That amount is nearly three times the $465 million that EpiPen’s owner, the big drugmaker Mylan, last October said it agreed to pay the federal government to settle claims that it overcharged the government-run Medicaid system for the devices.

“The fact that the EpiPen overpayment is so much more than anyone discussed publicly should worry every taxpayer,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Grassley said he learned of the large disparity between Mylan’s settlement amount and the potential overpayment by taxpayers from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General after asking officials for an accounting of EpiPen overcharges.

Mylan for years classified EpiPen as a generic drug for the purposes of Medicaid’s drug rebate program, and as a result paid a lower rebate rate to Medicaid than did sellers of brand-name drugs. Officials have said that EpiPen, which is used to counteract a potentially fatal allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis, should have been treated as a brand-name product for Medicaid’s rebate program.

Medicaid is the joint federal-state program that provides health-care coverage to primarily low-income Americans.

Why are Democrat-run corporations such cesspits of greed and exploitation?