Preferred Drug Lists are the bane of the practicing clinician. Instead of, for example, a psychiatrist being allowed to prescribe any antipsychotic they think appropriate, Medicaid requires them to pick from a list of only three, "on formulary" agents.

Unfortunately for doctors, the logic is sound. Unless one can show that, for example, two antipsychotics do not have the same general efficacy or tolerability across a population, than an insurance company cannot be reasonably obligated to provide both, especially if one is cheaper.

Psychiatrists complain that some patients respond better to one drug than another, but while this may be true, there is no way to predict this; try the formulary ones first. But this is just a red herring. What angers doctors is that these restrictions are an intrusion on their practice. Doctors are better able to decide risks and benefits of a medication; which drugs to prescribe, and when.

This would be a great argument if it were true. It isn’t.

The truth is that doctors are woefully ignorant of the available scientific data. As with literature and philosophy, most doctors read about the science, not the actual science itself. In general, doctors prescribe medicines not based on careful review of data, but impulse, habit, and the recommendations of “thought leaders.” (Seriously. They’re actually called that.) Prescribing medicines based on partial information or clinical soundbites may feel like "the art of medicine" but it is, in fact, a random process. It is certainly no better than having an insurance company that did review the data tell you what not to prescribe.

They also tend to practice in a vacuum. A patient’s psychiatrist and cardiologist have no link. Are the treatments synergistic? Antagonistic? Neither fully know that the other is doing.

And so, because doctors are not rigorous about their practice, someone else has to be. One of the most outrageous way psychiatrists, and possibly other physicians, waste money is to use multiple medications for a situation that could well have been handled by one. “Polypharmacy” is so common that it is actually codified in treatment guidelines, despite—and this is where insurance companies go insane—there being practically no evidence that this is ever appropriate. Why combine two antipsychotics when maybe more of one will do? It may seem plausible that two are better than one, but they aren’t. It may be true that a patient needs two drugs; but you can’t assume that. The default practice cannot be augmentation. That has to be the maneuver of last resort.

Loose practice has caused the paradigm shift. It used to be that everyone deferred to the judgment of the wise physician. No more. Now, it’s incumbent upon us to show why we need to use a treatment, not for the insurance company to trust that we know best, that we made a careful analysis of the risks and benefits—because we didn’t. We complain that medicine is being assaulted in a million different ways—insurance companies, lawyers, alternative practitioners—but the reality is it is the exact same assault: we are no longer trusted to know best.

So what to do? There is a solution. But you’re not going to like it.

Link each Medicaid patient with a pharmacy budget per specialty—money controlled by the psychiatrist. A psychiatrist can use any drug, any dose, no restrictions, but only up to, say, $10 a day. Go.

There are numerous advantages.

First, there is cost control.

Second, Pharma will inevitably cut prices in order to compete.

Third, it gives doctors their autonomy.

Fourth: it will force doctors to pay very close attention to what is, actually, best practice. They will have to be more attentive to outcome studies. They will have to predict side effects: if you’ll need to add a second drug to counteract the side effects of the first, it may be better to use a completely different drug.

Fifth: They will use fewer medicines. Two is not always better than one; but it certainly is twice as expensive with twice as many side effects.

Sixth: Pharma no longer has incentive to create “me too” drugs. They are incentivized to come up with novel, even niche, treatments.

If you really want to tax the imagination of doctors, and force a level of rigor in medicine that has not been seen since, well, since never, create a global pharmacy budget per patient across all subspecialties. This way, if a psychiatrist wants to prescribe Zyprexa, he’s going to have to discuss with the cardiologist whether that is more cost effective than the Lipitor. Wow.

The unexpected benefit is that the two doctors have to communicate. Maybe a switch from Zyprexa could preclude the need for Lipitor? Maybe? Hello? Let this communication be billable to Medicaid. $100 per “consultation” is more than offset by the pharmacy savings. There are going to be some patients who actually do require more money, more medications. In that case, the doctor can petition for increased benefits. Doctors hate doing this. Too bad. The problem was created by doctors, not by pharmacists.

Finally, to bring Pharma into the game: the first 30 days of a prescription must be piad for by the Pharma company making the drug, i.e. samples or vouchers.  This way, only the drug that actually works gets paid for by Medicaid.  That's gold. 

It’s worth stating, for the record, that I am opposed to government interference in my practice. I don’t particularly like lawyers, either. But the sad truth is that the state of psychiatry is the fault of psychiatrists, who have failed to take full responsibility for their own education and practice. To blame anyone else at this stage is totally disingenuous.