The drugmaker will pay $13 million to make a class-action lawsuit go away, according to Bloomberg News. Bristol-Myers was accused of artificially inflating the price of its Taxol cancer drug and other meds, causing consumers who made co-payments to pay more than they should have otherwise. The case was about to go to trial on July 23 in federal court in Boston, although Bristol-Myers didn’t admit wrongdoing.

Last month, US District Judge Patti Saris ordered Bristol, AstraZeneca and Schering-Plough to pay damages for overcharging on drugs through their average wholesale pricing, or AWP. The trial that was to begin next week concerned only co-payments for Bristol-Myers drugs made by patients, insurers and government agencies.

“We’re quite pleased with the settlement,” says Steven Berman, a lawyer who represents members of the Prescription Access Litigation Project. “Any time you get over 100 cents on the dollar in recovery for consumers, that’s pretty darn good.”

Two months ago, AstraZeneca agreed to pay $24 million to settle charges that patients overpaid for its Zoladex cancer med. And last August, Glaxo agreed to pay $70 million to settle claims by state attorneys general and consumers that the company used AWP to overcharge government-health programs for its medicines.

Bristol-Myers must also pay as much as $1 million for the cost of notifying affected consumers, Bloomberg reports. Consumers made insurance plan co-payments under Medicare Part B based on average wholesale prices for Bristol drugs, including Taxol, that were far higher than what the company was charging doctors and hospitals, according to the complaint. Saris will hold a hearing Aug. 9 to consider the Bristol settlement, according to a docket entry on her court’s Web site.

In an earlier case, Saris found that Bristol-Myers inflated AWP for five medications, including Taxol. The AWP price for the cancer drug was found to be as much as 500 percent higher than what was charged to doctors, Bloomberg notes. AWP, which is self-reported by drugmakers, was once used by government-health programs such as Medicare to set reimbursement rates.

Medicare moved away from the system. Some third-party insurance plans, including Blue Cross, still use it. Medicare, the federal health plan for the elderly, switched in 2004 from AWP to a system of paying 106 percent of the average reported sale price of a drug.

Consumers who say they were harmed by AWP pricing for more than 300 drugs sued in 2001, alleging an industrywide scheme to defraud the U.S. health-care system. The suit was carved up by Saris based on different drug types to make the litigation more manageable.