Switch to generic drugs a blow to patients - Hawaii Editorials

Thousands of state and county workers and their families will soon experience a fatal blow to their prescription drug plans.

[Kalli]

Greedy state and county workers, you're going to be like the rest of us retirees and you don't want to. Go on furlough.

[willie]

What? The difference between a generic and a non generic.....$$$$$

They HAVE to be the same chemical compound...to anyone who thinks the pink pill works any different than the generic equivilant red one I have a bridge I will leyt you have cheap.

[bumpercrop]

There is nothing wrong with generic meds. I always use them to save $$$ and I am not a state/city worker. Just an ordinary person trying to hang in there and make do. I would rather pay $5 out of my own pocket vs $50 (or more).
The govt 'workers' have been promised too much for too long and now there is money to pay for it all.

[Former Hawaii resident]

According to The Medical Letter, a publication which does not accept any advertising, studies have shown that for the ovewhelming majority of drugs there is no difference in effectivenss between a brand name drug and a generic version. The best way to control health care costs is to have consumers bear the burden of chosing more expensive options. When is is transparent (covered by the government of insurance) the consumer does not care if a more expensive drug is prescribed.

[Grant]

What an incredibly biased article. The author, Kevin Glick is president of the Hawaii Independent Pharmacists Association. He is more apparently more worried about losing business to mail order pharmacies than the health of his patients and promulgates fear and misleading statements to promote his cause (only your local pharmacist can properly put pills in a bottle for you.).

I've been getting 90-day supplies of my maintenance drugs online for over a year and it is great. I log in, order the refill and 2 days later the prescription in in my mailbox. If the prescription is expired, they call the doctor for me and then the doc calls to set up an appointment with me. And its all cheaper than what I had to do before!

If this is what fixing health care is all about, I'm for it!

[Flexo]

It seems the author is fear mongering in an attempt to keep his gravy train in operation. Notice his alluding to Canada as if that will scare people away.
What he should be doing is asking why local pharmacies weren't allowed to participate in the EUTF search for generic drug providers.
The real downside of this commentary is that the union bosses will seize on this and whip the legislature into cancelling what will be a money saver to the state.

[Jerry Okamura]

Whenever you depend on someone else to pay for what you want or need, they can give you what you want or need, or they can refuse to give you what you want or need. If you do not want someone else to make that decision for you, pay for what you want or need with your own money and not depend on someone else to pay.

[local]

There is nothing wrong taking generic drugs. I've been taking it for years and I'm still alive.

[PPBME]

The required switch is not to generic drugs. It is to a different drug which performs similar actions. People on Nexium (chemical: Esomeprazole) will be forced to use Prosilic OTC (chemical: Omeprazole). This is different from generic drugs which can be the exact same drug produced by a different company.

[CWD]

Clearly you folks complaining about generic drugs are not Kaiser members. Expensive branded drugs are aren't "better" than generics so, if you want to take them to help pay those obscenely high bonuses to their executives, then do so at your own expense, not the rest of us.

Even though we're Kaiser members, we're also taxpayers so your benefits come out of our pockets too.

[Not here]

Using the numbers provided: $151,000 divided by 8029 generic prescriptions equals $18.80 profit per prescription. For brand name: $72,690 divided by 3047 prescriptions equals $23.85 profit per brand name script. So this shows that pharmacies do make more money on brand name prescriptions. No wonder they don't want people choosing generics.

[Lee]

I think generics should be used
whenever possible. I do it because of the cost savings, and I don't do it
because a union or insurance plan tells me to do so. If I want to be stupid, and more more well I can do that.
But I never have. With or without health insurance. And currently,
I do not have health insurance.
It just makes good
dollar sense, to pay less and get
the same quality of drugs at the same time.

[Lee]

PS We too buy in 90 supply...
Generics
+ 90 Supply
__________
Saving Even More $$$

[Raining in Manoa]

If my math is correct the generic sales volume = 72% of sales but only generates 67% of profits. That seems to explain part of a pharmacists motivation to seek more sales of brand-name drugs which, evidently, have a higher profit margin. Not to completely explain away the explanations Mr. Glick gives us but pharmacists are in business to make money too and the higher profit margins may be a part of his motivation.

[lori]

Get used to generics. With Government Universal Health Care reform we'll all be using generics.

[Fair minded citizen]

What kind of medical credential does this author have? His agument seems contrary to what the medical professionals are sying.

[oof]

lori wrote:

Get used to generics. With Government Universal Health Care reform we'll all be using generics.

You mean those of us lucky enough to get to see a doctor who can write the prescription.

[Midnight Rambler]

The author is doing a bait-and-switch regarding generics vs. being required to switch drugs, as people have pointed out (and incidentally, there are differences between brand-name and generic drugs in some cases - they are required to have the same *active* ingredients but the "inactive" ingredients can have a big difference on how well they work).

More importantly, he's not pointing out why these classes of drugs are singled out. It's because there's a lot of money in things like Lipitor which are preventative, maintenance medicines that are prescribed long-term to people who aren't already sick. So there's an incentive for drug companies to keep inventing new ones that are under patent, and then push doctors to prescribe the new, more expensive drugs.

In actual fact, in many cases they've been shown not to work any better than the older drugs that are now available as generics, and sometimes even worse! That's why this kind of system is set up.

So for all you people bashing "government health care" - do you really want Big Pharma's bribery of doctors to be determining your health care???

[realmerv]

PPBME wrote:

The required switch is not to generic drugs. It is to a different drug which performs similar actions. People on Nexium (chemical: Esomeprazole) will be forced to use Prosilic OTC (chemical: Omeprazole). This is different from generic drugs which can be the exact same drug produced by a different company.

I also thought the switch was from name brand drugs to generic drugs. I was taking Avalide and paying $35 for a 90 day supply from InformedMail and I received a brochure which stated that the Preferred Alternatives were Atacand HCT, Benicar HCT or Diovan HCT. I ordered the Benicar HCT and was billed $35 for my 90 day supply so I called InformedMail in Florida and asked why I wasn't charged the $10 price for a 90 day supply of a generic drug. The Representative told me Benicar HCT is a brand name drug and not a generic drug. I looked it up on the internet and sure enough, Benicar HCT is a brand name drug. So besides forcing customers to switch to generic drugs, they are also forcing customers to switch into other name brand drugs.

I started off with Cozaar, then upgraded to Avalide which was working perfectly for me, now I have to test the Benicar HCT to see if it works for me or not.

[realmerv]

Fair minded citizen wrote:

What kind of medical credential does this author have? His agument seems contrary to what the medical professionals are sying.

An earlier posting said that he is a pharmacist. When it comes to prescription drugs, I'd rather listen to a pharmacist than to a doctor or other medical professional.