I'd file this under "don't hate the player, hate the game". Abbott can argue that they're maximising shareholder value, as they are legally obligated to do. The rules that make patent trolling and the like profitable, though -- that's what needs rallied against.
Well, that or change the legal definition of "corporation" to include a "don't be dicks" clause. And that's just not practical.
PS: I don't really like your title - it's pretty editorialised, and doesn't actually tell me anything about the article.
If Abbott wants to sell different doses of the same pill, I don't see how that could be prevented. But either the doctor or pharmacist should say, "Hey, this is the same drug, just at a slightly different dose, and actually no studies have shown that the new expensive one is better... so just use the cheap generic."
Doctors don't do that, and the acts that medical companies partake to go directly to the consumers are sometimes quite underhanded.
I was listening to an NPR special about a year ago on how, for some high-end medications which now have generics on the market, patients can receive 'coupons' for medications that cover their copays.
What does this mean? Well, for the generic the patient would have paid $7 and the insurance company would have paid maybe $50, for a total cost of $57 (hypothetically. In the case of the branded medication, the patient pays nothing (they would have paid more than the generic, usually twice or thrice the generic copay, but they pay nothing because they have a 'coupon'), but the insurance company might pay out upwards of $850 now, for a medication for which they may have paid $50.
This happens all over the country, and if it's even effecting one tenth of one percent of the US, you're looking at over a billion dollars in unnecessary healthcare spending.
The insurance companies are definitely not the Robin Hoods of the healthcare world, but they're also certainly not the worst aspect of that wasteful industry.
Why don't doctors do that? Shouldn't doctors know what the available drugs are to treat a disease?
And I know for a fact that sometimes pharmacists will give you a different size pill than the doctor requests, if it's substantially cheaper. They tell people to just break them in half, or take 2, or whatever.
Doctors do know the available drugs. . . but the current system is set up such that the primary channel for learning about them is direct-to-physician marketing by drug companies.
Which is hardly the most effective channel. In fact, studies have shown an inverse correlation between how much time a physician spends being "educated" by drug reps, and patient outcomes. Of course, while the patients' quality of care goes down the cost of care goes up, because they're paying out the nose for expensive new drugs instead of equivalent (or, as is often the case, superior) generics.
This is a pretty well known practice. Astra Zeneca, the maker of Prilosec, which is one of the most prescribed medicines in the world, has done this exact maneuver with Nexium.
