Ms. Winders said her group planned to send a formal submission to the United States Preventive Services Task Force in November. The patient advocates are separately planning to set up meetings with the nation’s eight largest insurers to ask them to add epinephrine auto-injectors to their own lists, even if the federal government does not make the move.

The task force could list the EpiPen in a couple of different ways: either mandating that insurers cover the auto injectors with no co-pay or putting them on a lower-priority list that many insurers still adopt, eliminating the co-pay even though the insurer is not required to do so. But Mylan, in a statement, said it was seeking the most exclusive status, on the A list. Under the Affordable Care Act, most private health insurance plans must cover certain recommended preventive service, including those on the A list, without any charge to the patient.

The article Dr. Fromer published in The American Journal of Medicine will almost certainly help the cause. It makes the exact argument that Mylan wants to push: “The recognition and classification of epinephrine as a preventive medicine by both the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and insurers could increase patient access, improve outcomes and save lives.”

The article, published online in late August, says in an acknowledgments section that Mylan paid for medical writing consultants who “drafted and revised” the paper based on input from Dr. Fromer. But in interviews, Dr. Fromer and a Mylan spokesman said the article had not been ghostwritten and that Dr. Fromer was heavily involved in the paper. He said he intended to ask the journal to revise the language in the article to make clear that he helped write it.

“My sole purpose in writing this article was to improve access to a lifesaving medication for millions of patients,” he said. He added that while he has served as a consultant to Mylan — with payments as recently as December — he was not paid by the company to write the article.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, whose office was among those contacted recently by the nonprofit groups working with Mylan, said he was disappointed with the company’s tactics: turning to patient groups and a doctor it has retained as a consultant to try to get its drug on the preventive list.

“This is the dark side of pharmaceutical practices in enlisting and paying professionals to pitch their profit-making drug,” he said.