> But, again, that’s how most businesses operate. Here’s a small freebie or a cheapie, if you like that, we can sell you a lot more.
In this case, though, it's:
> We have this new drug, whose strict required dosing regimen and annoying, long-lasting guaranteed withdrawal effects mean that your patients will be very unlikely to stop taking it... ever... or even to switch medications once they start on it, without your repeated insistence. (They can exponentially taper the drug, but we will never provide instructions on how to do that, nor fund studies on the success rate of doing that. Your medical education will have taught you a linear tapering procedure, that does not work at all for avoiding this drug's withdrawal effects.)
> Here's some free samples that you can use to hook your poorest patients on our drug — you know, the ones you'd normally prescribe generics so that their not-very-good insurance plans will cover them, or so that they can afford them out-of-pocket. We'll be back with more pretty frequently, so if you don't have very many patients, you may just be able to treat some of your poorest patients indefinitely from free samples alone. (But we know this won't work out for you in the long term, as we've calculated what would be enough for a prescriber operating at patient capacity, and we shoot for maybe 1/3rd of that. It'll only seem like a good idea when you're just starting a new practice.)
> Oh, and we also do have an Assistance Program, because we know the insurance carriers refuse to pay for our drug (since it's not considered to be any more effective than the generics... just yet. Our lobbying hasn't fully kicked in yet.) Our Assistance Program will allow those same poorest patients to continue to pay for the drug out-of-pocket once you've hooked them with the free samples, rather than having them convert to the generic. They'll be paying at a painful — but reduced to just doable! — rate. We'll cover the rest. (And still make a profit!)
> It is, of course, a needs-based Assistance Program. We aren't in the business of slicing into our own (huge) profit margin for charity. We're in the business of helping people get over medical stumbling blocks that might be preventing them from being productive, and thus preventing them from getting a high-earning job. Our data says that our Assistance Program acts as an amazing self-funded channel partnership for us, in that it manufactures high earners pre-primed to buy our drug. And of course, we can bilk them for as much profit as we want.
This might not reflect your specialty — this is from my experiences in psychiatry.