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Insurance Company Payola
Lipitor (atorvastatin) is a different medicine than Zocor (simvastatin). If the insurer wants to incentivize generic switching, it's one thing to motivate the patients financially. For example, charge them $5 co-pay for a generic and $10 for a brand-name drug after the medicine's patent expires. So, if a patient was already on Zocor, he can switch to generic simvastatin and save $5.
Note: the patient, not the doctor, makes the financial decision.
But to go to a different drug - that is appalling. If these doctors think simvastatin is the right med for their patients, why did they not prescribe Zocor in the first place?
Note: the patient, not the doctor, makes the financial decision.
But to go to a different drug - that is appalling. If these doctors think simvastatin is the right med for their patients, why did they not prescribe Zocor in the first place?
- posted by John R. Graham
- August 27, 2007 @ 7:43 pm
- Permalink
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Video about doctors switching patients: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae_JAYbgDS8" Target="_BLANK">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae_JAYbgDS8>
Study: Switch From Lipitor To Generic Ups Heart Risks
Dow Jones International News
English
(c) 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
VIENNA (Dow Jones)--Switching patients from Pfizer Inc.'s (PFE) cholesterol drug Lipitor to a generic version of Merck & Co Inc.'s (MRK) Zocor has been linked to a 30% increase in the risk of major heart complications, according to a Pfizer-sponsored study.
The study was presented Wednesday at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Vienna, Austria, and is due to be published in the British Journal of Cardiology.
The study was based on an analysis of a database of more than 11,000 U.K. patients which included records from October 1997 to June 2005.
The analysis compared 2,522 patients who had taken Lipitor for six months or more and were switched to Zocor, which is generically known as simvastatin, with 9,009 patients who remained on Lipitor therapy.
According to the study, patients who switched cholesterol treatment had 30% higher risk of death, heart attack, stroke and heart surgery than those who continued taking Lipitor.
Zocor and Lipitor belong to a class of drugs called statins, used to lower cholesterol levels in people with, or at risk of, cardiovascular disease.
"It's not beneficial to have a universal switch to cheaper statins," said study author Peter Lansberg, of the Academic Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
"We need to make a distinction between patients who benefit from generic statins and high-risk patients who need a more aggressive therapy."
The launch of generic copies of Zocor, which lost patent protection in June last year, has hurt Lipitor sales as health insurers have been encouraging patients to switch to the cheaper cholesterol-lowering drug.
In 2006, Lipitor sales reached $12.9 billion, making it the top-selling drug of all time and a key product for New York-based Pfizer in the last decade.
However, in the second quarter of 2007, the company's profit fell 48% on the back of slowing Lipitor prescriptions, whose global sales fell 13% compared with the same period in 2006.
The decline was steeper in the U.S., where sales slid 25% to $2.7 billion in the second quarter.
Company Web site: http://www.pfizer.com" Target="_BLANK">www.pfizer.com>
-By Elena Berton, Dow Jones Newswires; 44 207 842 9267; href="mailto:elena.berton@dowjones.com" elena.berton@dowjones.comTarget="_BLANK">elena.berton@dowjones.com> [ 05-09-07 0600GMT ]