<p>Try asking your doctor to specify “do not substitute” and to order the non-generic.</p>
<p>I order my family meds from a mail order pharmacy through insurance. As far as “do not subsitute”- it is fine if it is a cheap med. But sometimes there is a HUGE difference in price for generic. If the MD orders the “do not substitue”, we still have to pay the difference. Or the MD has to prove medical necessity. The mail order group (medco) with all of it’s other faults, actually puts the name of the manufacturer on the pill bottle. That is a very nice feature. </p>
<p>If you do have a different pill that you can not identify, check with your pharmacist like others suggested. Pills are filled by pharm techs, and “checked” by pharmacists before being given to patients. As someone else said, people make mistakes.</p>
<p>A number of the generic manufacturers (Greenstone, Par) are actually just divisions of brand manufacturers. Some of the manufacturers are so lazy, that the brand name is actually on the generic tablet.<br>
Most insurance policies will still charge you the increased rate for brands when generic is available even if prescriber write DAW.
Most of the remaining large brand only drugs will be going generic by 2013. The pipeline is not very robust.</p>
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<p>The doctor’s ordering the name brand drug doesn’t solve the co-pay problem.</p>
<p>^^^^Yes, sorry, I misread. After the deductible is met the insurance company may fill what the M.D. orders.</p>
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<p>I would like to do this, but no one is at home during the day, and we have a rural-style mailbox (on a post, out by the road). This means that anything delivered into that mailbox must sit for hours, often in very hot or very cold temperatures. I have never trusted mail-order drugs because I was afraid they might lose their effectiveness as a result of sitting in that mailbox. Regrettably, my employer does not allow employees to receive personal mail or packages at work; that would solve the problem, but considering the huge amount of mail they deal with already, I can see why they prohibit it.</p>