As the price of prescription medications rises, generic drugs offer a way for consumers to save money. Although generics have the same active ingredients as brand-name drugs and result in the same clinical effect, they typically cost up to 85 percent less.

But now, the generic drug industry is pushing back against a government effort to lower the cost of lifesaving medications, even though the plan is built around letting them make more generic drugs. In government filings reviewed by us, generic drugmakers insist the initiative threatens their own monopoly rights — which allow them to inflate their profits and keep even generic drug prices artificially high.

The industry also fears the initiative is a step toward allowing the federal government to manufacture medicines on its own — as has been proposed in Congress, and undertaken in California as well as in other countries.