The National Academy of Medicine estimated in 2012 that the United States wastes about $765 million of the money spent each year on health care. Reducing the waste could make more dollars available for other needs, and could lower the cost of care for all of us. So this year I set out to identify examples of wasted health care spending, and point to solutions that could save our money.
I visited a Maine nonprofit organization that has warehouses full of brand new supplies and gently used equipment that have been thrown out by hospitals. Similar charities exist across the country but they only collect a small portion of the valuable goods that get discarded. Most of it goes to the dump.
I reported how nursing homes toss out hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of unexpired and untainted medication. Often they flush it down the toilet, which contaminates our water supply. Meanwhile in Iowa, the state government funded a nonprofit that gathers the discarded medication, inspects it, and dispenses it to patients for free. This year the nonprofit will save about $6 million in medication from destruction. My story prompted lawmakers in Florida and New Hampshire to introduce bills to create similar programs, and other states are also having conversations about doing the same.
I learned that drug expiration dates don’t mean what we think they mean, which leads to untold amounts of waste. The Food and Drug Administration makes drug companies show their medication is safe and effective up to the expiration date, but it doesn’t make the companies determine how long the products actually last. Meanwhile, studies show many drugs last years beyond their expiration dates. The FDA itself runs a program that extends the expiration dates on products in the government stockpiles. But those same drugs are being thrown away when they expire in hospital pharmacies, a waste of an estimated $800 million a year in those facilities alone.
Drug companies are making patients waste money by making eyedrops and vials of cancer drugs much larger than what they can use. Every eyedrop is bigger than what the eye can contain-many are two to three times too large. There’s no therapeutic benefit. The companies know their drops are too big and have done studies that show smaller drops are just as effective. Yet the waste continues.
One study showed our country wastes about $1.8 billion due to single-use cancer vials being oversized. One cancer clinic estimated patients are billed about $1,000 per infusion for the waste associated with one type of drug.
In response to my story several U.S. senators introduced a bill to correct the problem with oversized eyedrops and cancer drug vials.
I found that hospitals and doctors will often provide too much care, or care that’s more expensive than necessary, which is costing patients billions of dollars. I used several examples to illustrate the problem. The most absurd involved a surgeon piercing a 5-year-old girl’s ears when she went in for a different elective procedure. The hospital charged an $1,877 operating room fee for the ear piercing.
One of my goals in the “Wasted Medicine” series was to hammer home the point that all of this money being wasted is our money – tax dollars, or money coming from our insurance premiums or out of pocket payments. If the waste could be reduced we could lower our health care costs, which are the highest in the world.
Judges’ comments: We thought this was a truly outstanding reporting and writing effort, which jarred our sensibilities and brought about some real change. We hope it brings about more. ALL entries were great this year.