( CNN ) -- Your tax dollars that fund Medicare may be going toward excessive amounts of name-brand drugs when cheaper generics could be prescribed instead , a new report suggests . A small portion of doctors nationwide is costing American taxpayers big time because of their tendency to prescribe name-brand medications through Medicare even when generics are available , according to an analysis by ProPublica , a nonprofit organization producing `` investigative journalism in the public interest . '' The biggest offenders are 913 practitioners who , thanks to disproportionately prescribing name-brand drugs , cost taxpayers an extra $ 300 million in 2011 , say ProPublica 's Charles Ornstein , Tracy Weber and Jennifer LaFleur . Each of these doctors wrote at least 5,000 prescriptions that year , according to the report . Many of these doctors also had financial ties to the companies that manufacture the drugs they prescribed , ProPublica reports , and have accepted thousands of dollars from drug companies in the form of promotional or consulting fees . Although Medicare 's drug program has been considered an achievement in government health care , `` this seeming fiscal success has hidden billions of dollars lost to unnecessarily expensive prescribing over the program 's eight-year history , '' the report said . The detriments of Part D. Part of the wasted money results from well-intended aspects of Medicare . A provision called Part D , which has given individuals with low incomes access to cheap medications , has at the same time enabled doctors to prescribe name-brand drugs without complaint from low-income patients , ProPublica said . Regardless of the medication 's cost , Part D allows patients to pay less than $ 7 per prescription if they have low incomes . The lack of incentives for cheaper drugs for low-income patients is an important point raised by the report , said Jonathan Gruber , an MIT economics professor who was not involved in the study . Insurance companies can use financial incentives to sway participants who are not impoverished toward generic coverage , Gruber said , which has generally prompted a shift toward lower-cost generic coverage . But low-income populations are covered by the subsidy , which caps what they pay for prescriptions anyway , so there are n't financial incentives for the use of generics . `` Medicare needs to find a different way to monitor prescribing patterns and lower costs for this population , '' Gruber said in an e-mail . Part D cost taxpayers $ 62 billion last year , and more than a third of that went toward this low-income subsidy , ProPublica reported . More than 11 million people receive the subsidy . The ProPublica piece pointed to an analysis from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission , or MedPAC , which reports to Congress on Medicare , showing that Medicare could save $ 1.3 billion a year in seven drug categories if generics were prescribed to low-income patients and other Medicare enrollees in the same proportion . The savings might be even more , to the tune of $ 44 billion in a decade , according to the Washington think tank Bipartisan Policy Center . Medicare pays for one in four prescriptions in the United States , ProPublica said , but it does not limit the name-brand drugs that physicians can prescribe . Who are the doctors prescribing so many name-brand medications ? ProPublica found some patterns in ethnic neighborhoods and areas around large cities . For instance , a stretch of Koreatown in Los Angeles has seven of the doctors with high rates of name-brand prescribing , and a building in Brooklyn with six such doctors is in a Russian community . The `` average cost of a Part D prescription in these enclaves can be more than 50 percent higher than that of surrounding areas , '' ProPublica said . A challenge for the medical community . The report 's findings about money wasted on brand-name drugs are n't too surprising , said Dr. Tara Bishop , assistant professor of public health and medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York . `` I think that there 's a lot of marketing and misconceptions about how good is the newest , latest drug for which there 's not a generic alternative , '' said Bishop , who was not involved with the ProPublica report . There are few instances where brand-name drugs are superior to their generic alternative , Bishop said . She could not think of a specific example . `` By and large , if there is a generic , it should be prescribed , '' she said . There are some efforts already in place toward addressing the problem . For instance , the way Bishop 's electronic health records are set up , when she enters a medication into her system , a generic gets automatically prescribed if one is available . She also noted that sometimes pharmacies will give patients the generic version of a drug even if the brand name has been prescribed unless the physician has specified otherwise . There are also drugs that have no generic equivalent , Bishop noted . But for those that do have generic alternatives , marketing efforts are generally stronger for the brand-name versions . `` Many of us who practice medicine and know about the issues of rising health care costs , know that we spend a lot on brand-name medications when we do n't necessarily need to , '' she said . `` This is an interesting study because it quantifies it with a very small group of doctors . '' Variations in prescriptions for brand-name drugs have been on the radar of many insurance companies and health care researchers , Bishop said . They should look at the issues presented in the ProPublica report to help control rising health care costs , she said . Why some doctors continue prescribing brand-name versions of drugs that have generic equivalents is an important question , she said . `` That 's a question that the medical community has to come to terms with , '' she said . `` Are we not being good stewards of the resources that are available by prescribing things that could have cheaper , as effective alternatives ? ''
ProPublica report : $ 300 million wasted on name-brand drugs . Taxpayers paid Hundreds of millions of dollars extra in eight-year thanks to more than a third practitioners , report says . ProPublica Part D has no incentive for low-income patients to demand generics , professor says .