> The whole thing caused me to very seriously question the strength of "medical opinion", given patient history, a routine request to simply continue proven treatment turned into a risk scenario for no reason other than the tangled mess of insurers, agreements, drug manufacturers, and the like all more focused on profit than they are patient health.

The flip side of this is the "pharmaceutical representative" entire job description. Basically, your doctor has a wide range of words they use to describe how to treat you. Some of them wind up with the insurance company paying $15 for generic medication, while others wind up doing something like spending $400 on something under patent protection. Pharma's reps jobs are to talk to physicians and educate/convince them to use the expensive words instead of the cheap words out of force of habit.

Anyhow, that's why HMOs and insurers have approved medication lists - to push back against doctors writing down a $400 word instead of a $15 because a pharma representative said that FooBar XR treats Baz syndrome and the doctor wrote that down instead of the generic BarFoo.