Drug companies are questioning Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement that there could be a law mandating doctors to prescribe medicines with their generic names instead of brand names. The Union health ministry on Friday asked the medical community to follow a 2016 notification by the Medical Council of India (MCI) that mandates doctors to prescribe medicines by generic names. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a “generic“ as a bioequivalent to a brand name drug.
So, doctors might have to prescribe the molecule name. Modi's proposal is seen as an attempt to bring expensive drugs to poor Indians, and also as a not-so-subtle swipe to regulate the doctor-drug company nexus considered to be one of the reasons patients have to pay more for their medical expenses. There is already a code in the MCI that states that doctors should prescribe generic medicines as much as possible.…
