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A Colorado bill will prevent health insurers from offering incentives to doctors to prescribe cheaper generics rather than Big Pharma’s pricier brands.

An interesting development in the ongoing pharmaceutical doctor-bribing drama across the country is taking place in Colorado, where a bill is pending approval that bans health insurers from providing incentives (read “payola”) to doctors to switch patients’ drugs from more expensive brand names to cheaper generics.

Sen. Paula Sandoval, (D-Denver), sponsoring the Colorado bill, told Associated Press that a patient’s health should be a doctor’s primary concern. “There shouldn’t be any financial incentive interfering with that decision,” she said, adding that there have been reports of kickbacks from insurance companies and lawsuit settlements in other states, and the new bill would ensure it doesn’t happen in Colorado.

Of course, Kaiser Permanente, along with major insurance players AARP and the insurance industry’s Colorado Association of Health Plans, all oppose the bill. These are the folks who write the checks for brand-name prescriptions. More generics save them a bundle.

But believe it or not, major Big Pharma player Pfizer Inc., which ranks number one in the world in sales, was actively involved in helping Colorado’s medical society shape the bill. If doctors were to prescribe more generic replacements for Pfizer’s blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor, for example, which cranks out a whopping $13.5 billion in annual sales and accounts for nearly a third of Pfizer’s revenue and 40 percent of its profit, it could inflict serious damage.

We don’t need to ask why Pfizer has taken an interest in this bill. What we need to ask is why the state of Colorado and Sen. Sandoval in particular have brought in, or even allowed, an individual Big Pharma corporation with billions at stake to help draft a bill that keeps the billions rolling in?

That’s just inviting the fox in to help design the hen-house fence.

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