| dc.description.abstract |
This study uses the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (2006-2010) and Health
Tracking Physician Survey (2008) to study the incentives and characteristics that
explain physician generic prescribing habits. The findings can be characterized into
four main categories: (1) financial/economic, (2) informational, (3) patient-dependent
and (4) drug idiosyncratic effects. Physicians in practices owned by HMOs or practices
that had at least one managed care contract are significantly more likely to prescribe
generic medicines. Furthermore, physicians who have drug industry influence are less
likely to prescribe generic medicines. This study also finds consistent evidence that
generic prescribing is reduced for patients with private insurance compared to self-pay
patients. Drug-specific characteristics play an important role for whether a drug
is prescribed as a generic or brand-name - including not only market characteristics,
such as monopoly duration length, public familiarity with the generic and the quality
of the generic, but also non-clinical drug characteristics, such as the length of
the generic name compared the length of the brand-name. In particular, the public's
familiarity with the generic has a large effect on the generic prescribing rate for
a given drug. There are few differences between the generic prescribing habits of
primary care physicians and specialists after controlling for the drugs prescribed.
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