[JURIST] California's Attorney General Bill Lockyer [official website] said Thursday that the state is suing 39 pharmaceutical companies [press release] for concealing the actual costs of their drugs in an attempt to artificially inflate payments from California's Medicaid program. Lockyer said he added new drug companies [amended complaint] including GlaxoSmithKline and Amgen [corporate websites] to the state's prior complaint which named Abbott Laboratories and Wyeth [corporate websites] as defendants. The companies are alleged to have defrauded California into paying higher reimbursement rates in the Medi-Cal program [official website] for the poor, a practice that Lockyer calls "gouging the public on basic life necessities." Almost a dozen other states have filed similar suits which have been consolidated in a federal court in Boston. Reuters has more.