Looking to save $3.5 billion, Spain has just passed a law that forces doctors and pharmacists to prescribe generic drugs rather than brand-name meds. Doctors must now write prescriptions that only give details of the active ingredients, as well as the dose and format. And pharmacies are obligated to provide patients with the lowest-cost drug that is available, The Guardian writes.

In Spain, both the government and patients share in paying for medicines. And the debt-ridden Spanish government is trying to eke out savings wherever possible. “It means an important saving for the public accounts and will, without doubt, benefit most people who use public health services,” Basque nationalist deputy Josu Erkoreka tells the paper. “The interests of the big drugs companies must give way to public interest, and what matters is reducing the deficit and lowering the drugs bill for millions of people who use public health services.”

The prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, told parliament the bill would help Spain to lower the cost of drugs to the government, a move that began last year and which has led to the first-ever drop in the nation’s spending on pharmaceuticals. Expenditures were already cut this year by 10 percent, in part because of measures that had increased the generic drugs used. The government wants to lower its deficit from 11.1 percent in 2009 to 6 percent by the end of 2011.

But drugmakers say they will be hurt and jobs are likely to be lost. Spain’s 17 autonomous regions reimburse pharmacies for filling prescriptions from the National Health System and also pay drugmakers for meds used in public hospitals, using transfers from the central government. Drugmakers are now having to wait as long as two years for payment from the heavily indebted regions, which have agreed to cut spending even more steeply this year, according to Reuters.

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