There was an interesting story on channel 5 news the other night regarding prescription drugs. The long and short of the story (link below) is that insurance companies are giving doctors kickbacks to substitute generic drugs for the patients’ regular prescriptions.
My understanding is that generic drugs can provide nearly identical treatment for a much lower price, so it makes sense for insurance companies to push for them. But as with most health care topics, this issue is complex and raises some ethical questions. Some of the questions brought up in the piece are as follows:
Should doctors benefit at all for prescribing less expensive drugs? Should those savings go toward lowering insurance premiums?
If doctors are personally benefiting from prescribing a specific drug, are they obligated to tell their patients?
Can a doctor switch a prescription from a regular brand to a generic drug without informing the patient?
The more I think about the story, the more suspect it seems. Watch the piece and discuss.
Thanks for bringing up the issue of prescription drugs.
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I think that when you look at how much money big pharma is spending to push drugs to doctors and consumers this is like a drop in the bucket of an issue. Big Pharma will do anything to keep generics off the market.
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Check out http://www.prescript… ( disclosure: I work there as a project associate) for a sampling of some of our lawsuits against their tacticts to raise the costs and increase demand for brand name prescription drugs.
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In one case we showed how big pharma was raising costs arbitrarily through the average wholesale price system. In another we argued that an AIDS drug manufacturer was giving doctors rewards for prescribing AIDS wasting drugs to patients who didn’t need them. In another we argue that VIOXX marketed its drug as though it was better than much much less expensive drugs even though it was not.