It's good for business.
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“Doctors regularly hold women’s birth control prescriptions hostage, forcing them to come in for exams,” wrote Stephanie Mencimer in a Mother Jones piece about her own doctor doing so. Dr. [Jeffrey] Singer described as it doctors extorting pay for a “permission slip” to get the same medication over and over again. Feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte says doctors use “the pill as bait” to make sure women come in once a year. Both doctors and public health officials publicly worry that women won’t receive annual cervical cancer and sexually transmitted infection (STI) screenings without such coercion. How much of this concern is motivated by profit, how much by paternalism, is hard to say. …
It’s not just some doctors and medical groups who want to keep things status quo. Pharmaceutical companies also gain from it. OTC sales “would drive down the prices substantially,” says Singer. Drugmakers can get higher prices from insurance companies than they could in a competitive contraceptive market. … Yet the pharmaceutical industry is the only entity with standing to challenge the prescription status of current birth control pills. In order to initiate the switch from prescription to nonprescription, a drug maker must approach the FDA.
This is a good illustration of the relationship between interest groups and executive agencies. File this under sub-governments and iron triangles. It gets to the heart of what really drives decision making.
