SC Senate Chips Away at Medicaid Spending

COLUMBIA — South Carolina senators chipped away Wednesday at spending on the state’s Medicaid program, approving budget measures that will make it tougher for patients with mental illness or HIV/AIDS to get name-brand drugs.

The $5.8 billion spending plan the Senate is considering for the fiscal year that begins July 1 includes more than $1 billion for Medicaid programs.

Budget writers had approved making sure patients with mental illness or HIV/AIDS could continue getting name-brand drugs if they were stable on them. But a handful of senators said it was a waste of money to allow free access to the more expensive drugs without trying generics.

State Sen. Kevin Bryant, an Anderson pharmacist and Republican, said he’s seen no generic drug that didn’t perform as well as its name-brand counterpart. “It just bothers me in the drug store to see the taxpayer’s money — Medicaid dollars — going to waste,” Bryant said.

The Post and Courier

This is just a common sense policy.  I managed a CVS pharmacy up north for two years.  I spent a lot of time working up in the actual pharmacy helping to fill prescriptions.  There is essentially no difference between the brand name drug and the generic name drug.  It’s just a matter of who created it first.

Take a well known brand name drug like Prozac, for instance.  Eli Lilly was the pharmaceutical company that created the drug, actually called fluoxetine.  Since they were the creators they get a patent protection from the federal government for 12 years and they market it under the name Prozac.  Prozac is the brand name.  When the patent for Prozac expired in 2001, it allowed other drug makers to produce fluoxetine as well and that becomes the generic version, but both the generic and Prozac are fluoxetine and do the same thing and the generic is cheaper most of the time.

I only remember one prescription where a doctor was insistent about filling only the brand name drug.  I myself have always taken the generic version of a medication when available.  There is simply no reason for the taxpayers of this state to have to dole out extra money for a more expensive version of the same thing.

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