Generic Drugs: The True Free Lunch You may have asked yourself before, what is the difference between brand medicines and generic drugs? Due to other products, you may associate the word generic with knock-offs that are sort of close to the original product, but differ a lot in quality. They may be much cheaper, but they are never the same. Using that experience, you may assume the same could hold true for brand-name medicines and the generic drugs that proclaim to be equivalents. However, this assumption couldn’t be further from the truth.
To understand the true difference between brand-name and generic drugs, you need to understand the legal concept of the patent. The reason drug companies pour millions of dollars into the development and testing of drugs is because once their drug is approved by the FDA for use that company will receive a patent. The drugs we usually think of as brand-names are those that received the patent first. The patent prevents competitors from releasing their own versions of these drugs for twenty years, unless the patent holder licenses out that right for a rather hefty fee. Since the patent holder is the only company with the right to sell or license these drugs during that time frame, it can create a lot of revenue to help offset the cost of all that expensive research and development that went into that brand medicine. The amount of money spent to develop the drug is also reflected in its retail price to the consumer.
A generic drug enters the equation after that patent expires. Competitors are suddenly legally able to produce the same drug without paying for a license to do so from the former patent holder. Due to the fact that the competitor did not spend all that money for research and development, they are able to sell it at a much cheaper price. You may think that the cheaper price may also reflect a difference in quality, but this is false. All generic drugs must undergo extensive testing to prove to the FDA that they contain the exact same ingredients, dissolve in the human body at the exact same rate, have the exact same dosage requirements, and so forth. How generic drugs are allowed to differ from brand medicine is negligible such as the use of different colored pills or different preservatives. So in the case of generic drugs, something that seems too good to be true is actually true. They are nearly identical to brand-name drugs in nearly every way except for the difference in cost to the consumer.
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