Word: generics
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...already called for one in Masachusetts. And some thing may come out of these hearings, something more productive than the Kefauver investigations on monopoly drug pricing, because now for the first time, everyone will know that brand name drugs cost two to twenty times as much as their generic equivalent. Burack's book will at last let the public in on what pharmacists and many physicians have known for years...
Buracek's book, published by Random House and released this week, includes extensive tables of the prices of chemically equivalent drugs. The tables point out enormous differences in price between brand name and generic drugs. Dexedrine, for example, is Smith Kline and French's brand name for the generic drug dextroamphetamine sulfate...
Smith Kline & French has a patent on dexedrine which ran out after 17 years. Now, as Burack lists them, 16 companies make the generic product, 12 of them for $2.00 or less wholesale per 1000 5 mg. tablets. But dexedrine itself, which is chemically the same thing, sells...
...drug industry, he says, spends $600 million annually on advertising -- four times what it spends on research. And laws in 39 states make it mandatory for a pharmacist to sell a patient the brand name if his doctor orders it on a prescription. If he writes a generic name, however, the pharmacist may do as he pleases...
Another complicating factor was the difference between trade and generic names of the prescribed drugs. The generic name is simply the chemical name and a prescription specifying the compound this way is usually less expensive. Doctors may write the prescription another way, depending on their personal preference. This results in different prices for identical drugs...