How do the patent extenders work? I mean, what's to stop the generic from just continuing to make the original formula, if the alterations don't actually do anything?
Your patients don't want the old drug, do they? They don't want some pain, they want none.
Of course, Nopainatall is just Lowpainex combined with Tylenol... but that's inconvenient to take separately.
One wonders how many doctor-hours per year are spent by the consumers/patients initiating such conversations.
Another class of "patent extender" is to take two existing good drugs, package them together, and then trial and sell it as a new drug. The combined product is not the same as the two off-patent generic parent drugs.
There are hundreds of examples -- this is a totally standard patent expiration strategy in medicine. This whole area is called "ever-greening".
The weirdest one is getting an existing drug approved for a new use. This can be used to extend patent protection.
In Germany, 100 pills desloratadine are about 50 EUR. 100 pills loratadine are 10 EUR.
I can't imagine these things are hugely different in the land of the free.
Of course, she wanted to refuse it-- but after they walked it all the way down the wing, how could she tell her staff that they weren't actually getting any cake?
They are scumbags, for sure.
Malcolm Gladwell, covered this and other issues affecting pharmaceutical pricing in a 2004 article. It's an even-handed article, worth reading the entire piece -
the one relevant to me on a daily basis is zyrtec/xyzal -- xyzal is just zyrtec filtered for the correct chiral form, but the prescription is cheaper than the OTC for me thanks to my insurances' rules.