The medicines are exactly the same as the brand-name drug — often made in the same factory with the same equipment to the same formula. Only the name and the packaging are different. It is, perhaps, a sign of how desperate Americans are for something — anything — to counteract the escalating price of drugs that Lilly's move was greeted with praise rather than a collective "Huh?" Imagine if Apple sold a $500 iPhone for $250 if it was called, say, a yPhone, and simply lacked the elaborate white box and the little Apple logo on the back. That would be patently absurd. An iPhone in a brown paper bag is still an iPhone. And Humalog with a new name isn't a generic — except according to the bizarre logic of the pharmaceutical industry. Like so many parts of our health care system, its existence has more to do with convoluted business arrangements than health. Generics, as traditionally understood, are copies of brand-name drugs made by competing manufacturers once the original patent protection has expired.