Prescribing Generic Drugs: A Paradigm Shift for the Worse

According to the latest regulations, Registered Medical Practitioners (‘the RMPs’) have to prescribe generic drugs to the patient as a strategy to reduce medical bills and provide low-cost medicines.

Understanding how the medicines are priced

Various parameters include research, raw materials, quality checks, storage, and transportation to consider before adding the final Maximum Retail Price (‘the MRP’). Brand-name medicines are known to be expensive because they go through various quality checks and research to ensure patient safety. Surprisingly, the Medical Council of India (‘the MCI’), issued a notification over a decade ago stating that doctors in India should preferentially prescribe pharmaceuticals by their generic name, lacks the definition of what a “generic drug” is.

In comparison to other countries, the Indian drug industry is a lot more affordable. The world is moving towards branding the most minor products in our daily lives; however, in healthcare, where quality is the top priority of any individual, we are moving backward. Pharmaceutical brands across the globe dominate the world with such expensive healthcare that is only possible due to medical insurance.

Moreover, the substantial revenue generated from trademark and licensing fees, which have skyrocketed nearly 30-fold in the last decade. As we transition to generic prescriptions, there's a coming question of how these losses will be recuperated, significantly impacting stakeholders.

This generic prescription will lead to a further decrease in quality to gain more profit margins. In a summarised manner, the shift towards writing pharmacological names (generic names) will only worsen the situation as it may give power to retailers. These retailers may sell drugs depending upon the companies providing them with high-margin profit and freebies to them. Suffice it to say, it will be tantamount to old wine in a new bottle, wherein the pharmaceutical companies’ focus will shift to the retailers instead. This also leads to another question about the efficacy of the drugs and a major conflict of interest among doctors and retailers. According to the National Medical Council (‘the NMC’), there are a million chemist shops all over India which the government has no control over. 

As per the official website of the Jan Aushadhi Yojana, there are only 9,734 centers across India against a population of 140 crores, accessible only in metro cities while the major population still lies in rural India. Rather than making this a political agenda, the government should work on better facilities and improving quality standards. The pharmaceutical market is already competitive and continued over-regulation may lead the industry to collapse consequently leading to the withdrawal of the existing investments.

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