Word: generic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Congress made an attempt to defuse the drug-price crisis in 1984 when legislators passed the Waxman-Hatch Drug Act, designed to encourage companies to manufacture more non-brand-name versions of prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical firms may sell these so-called generic drugs only after the brand name has lost its patent protection. The 1984 law streamlined the FDA approval process for generic drugs, reducing the time from an average of three years to a few months. Manufacturer sales of the low-cost drugs thereupon leaped from $3.5 billion in 1984 to $7 billion...
...measure proved to be only a partial solution. Last July a bribery scandal rocked the U.S. industry when three FDA reviewers pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from generic-drug companies. The revelations threw doubt on the efficacy of some generics. Meantime, drug prices continued their upward spiral -- primarily because of the fundamental forces that drive the modern pharmaceutical industry...
After a medication has lost its patent protection, many companies raise the price to recoup some of the losses caused by the immediate drop in market share. A company can forfeit as much as 30% of that share in the first year after generic substitutes become available, but many physicians continue to prescribe only the brand-name medications they have come to trust and rely on. When generic versions of the potent heart medication Dyazide were introduced in the mid-1980s, the drug's inventor, SmithKline Beckman, raised the compound's price...