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Colorado’s new bill banning health insurers giving kickbacks to doctors to prescribe cheaper generics ignores Big Pharma’s similar, and even more lavish, practice in favor of their pricier brand name drugs.

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, there’s nothing to deal with the Big Pharma’s equally offensive widespread practice of doctor bribery supporting brand names.

This is a big switcheroo from Massachusetts, where a bill is nearing approval that outright bans Big Pharma from bribing — sorry, from providing “incentives” — to doctors to encourage them to prescribe their brand name drugs. Even a federal bill is pending that requires Big Pharma to report to the feds any and all “gifts” made to physicians over a value of $25.

Lynn Parry, past president of the Colorado Medical Society which was involved in creating the Colorado bill, told the Associated Press that in Colorado, drug makers can still offer lunches or dinners to doctors to provide information about their drugs. “It’s not a hard sell by any means and I think they work as hard as they can to not directly influence, but they’re a business,” she said.

In his Pharmalot blog, Ed Silverman nicely sums up our opinion of Parry’s statement: “Hmmm . . . How much of a difference is there between incentives?”

To which I would add: Ms. Parry, wake up and smell the coffee. Lunches or dinners? What about free golfing trips to sunny tropical isles, expenses-paid conferences in exotic foreign lands, or expensive nights out on the town with hints at sexual favors?

Big Pharma’s lavish “incentives”, well documented by former pharma reps, make the health insurers paltry “incentives” look like garage-sale discounts.

Goodness knows why any doctor with a shred of integrity accepts kick-backs, bribes or “incentives” from the insurance industry or Big Pharma, under any guise or for any reason. But apparently most or many do, and the practice is getting worse, not better.

It’s fine to curb physician bribery by the insurance industry, but Colorado should take another look at Big Pharma’s billion-dollar doctor bribery system that it’s been using to great effect for years, and follow Massachusetts’ example. There should be no financial incentives from any quarter when it comes to patient health.

Let doctors make prescription decisions based on science, not a free lunch.

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