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>Please, by all means, construct a more accurate model. Gee, you get to just hand-wave an entire manufacturing process and supply chain into insignificance, bu

>Please, by all means, construct a more accurate model. Gee, you get to just hand-wave an entire manufacturing process and supply chain into insignificance, but I need a model, huh? Fine. Let's use a generic drug (ie, not paying patent/development costs) as a proxy for how much the entire supply side costs. How about loratidine. You can get that at Walmart (stocked on the shelf, since that's mostly what the article was discussing) for about 10 cents/pill.[1] Of course that's completely ignoring the disposal costs. I strongly doubt that disposing of hospital/pharmacy quantities of drugs is as easy as chucking them in the municipal landfill. Let's say it costs 10% of the purchase price. So 11 cents/pill just to run a pill through the supply chain and then dispose of it. Intensifying the napkin math... CDC says there were ~3.4 billion visits that resulted in drugs "provided or ordered". [2] Let's say that those were an average of 7 days worth of drugs ordered, so ~30 billion doses. Let's say that 10% of that much is either wasted by the consumer, or wasted while sitting on a shelf before anybody bought it - 3 billion pills. 3 billion pills/year * 0.11 cents/pill = $330 million/year. I dunno, seems potentially significant, at least to an order of magnitude level. Especially since the costs of the FDA program to extend the shelf life was around 1% of that much. Ref: [1] - https://www.walmart.com/ip/Equate-Loratadine-10-mg-300-ct/20629925 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Equate-Loratadine-10-mg-300-ct/20... [2] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-use-therapeutic.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-use-therapeutic.htm

jessriedel 9y ago
> Gee, you get to just hand-wave an entire manufacturing process and supply chain into insignificance, but I need a model, huh? Nope, for this you just need a number! (In my comment, the "model" part referred to how monopoly pricing was done.) > So 11 cents/pill just to run a pill through the supply chain and then dispose of it. Good, your estimate process is a reasonable one, and I accept this number. > $330 million/year...I dunno, seems potentially significant, at least to an order of magnitude level. Ok, let's compare to what the article says: > Experts estimate such squandering eats up about $765 billion a year — as much as a quarter of all the country’s health care spending. So we see that our cocktail napkin math has been extremely useful, and that the article has overstated the size of the issue by some three orders of magnitude! (25% --> 0.01%) The many suggestions in the article that this is important on the level of the entire health care system is absolute bunk. Thank you for engaging in this exercise with me!
- cbr 9y ago
  $765B is their estimate for all waste, not just wasted pills: ProPublica has been researching why the U.S. health care system is the most expensive in the world. One answer, broadly, is waste — some of it buried in practices that the medical establishment and the rest of us take for granted. We’ve documented how hospitals often discard pricey new supplies, how nursing homes trash valuable medications after patients pass away or move out, and how drug companies create expensive combinations of cheap drugs. Experts estimate such squandering eats up about $765 billion a year — as much as a quarter of all the country’s health care spending. Later on they say: Tossing such drugs when they expire is doubly hard. One pharmacist at Newton-Wellesley Hospital outside Boston says the 240-bed facility is able to return some expired drugs for credit, but had to destroy about $200,000 worth last year. A commentary in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings cited similar losses at the nearby Tufts Medical Center. Play that out at hospitals across the country and the tab is significant: about $800 million per year. And that doesn’t include the costs of expired drugs at long-term care pharmacies, retail pharmacies and in consumer medicine cabinets. This isn't estimating the same thing as the GP's $330M (hospital waste instead of consumer waste) but $800M is on the same scale, suggesting to me that the marginal cost of drugs might matter some. (I do agree with your point that most of the cost, and especially the most egregious examples like the wasted epi-pens, don't represent real costs because of monopolies.)
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    Hey thanks! This is a good clarification. I'm happy to modify my criticism from "the author is strictly off by a factor of 1000" to "the author strongly leads the reader to believe the size of the effect is 1000 times stronger than it really is, but he deftly avoids saying anything that's technically false, and in any case the reader shouldn't care about this since it represents an dead-weight loss of about $2 per person per year, which is less than the value of the reader's time spent reading this article".

jessriedel 9y ago

> Gee, you get to just hand-wave an entire manufacturing process and supply chain into insignificance, but I need a model, huh? Nope, for this you just need a number! (In my comment, the "model" part referred to how monopoly pricing was done.) > So 11 cents/pill just to run a pill through the supply chain and then dispose of it. Good, your estimate process is a reasonable one, and I accept this number. > $330 million/year...I dunno, seems potentially significant, at least to an order of magnitude level. Ok, let's compare to what the article says: > Experts estimate such squandering eats up about $765 billion a year — as much as a quarter of all the country’s health care spending. So we see that our cocktail napkin math has been extremely useful, and that the article has overstated the size of the issue by some three orders of magnitude! (25% --> 0.01%) The many suggestions in the article that this is important on the level of the entire health care system is absolute bunk. Thank you for engaging in this exercise with me!

cbr 9y ago
$765B is their estimate for all waste, not just wasted pills: ProPublica has been researching why the U.S. health care system is the most expensive in the world. One answer, broadly, is waste — some of it buried in practices that the medical establishment and the rest of us take for granted. We’ve documented how hospitals often discard pricey new supplies, how nursing homes trash valuable medications after patients pass away or move out, and how drug companies create expensive combinations of cheap drugs. Experts estimate such squandering eats up about $765 billion a year — as much as a quarter of all the country’s health care spending. Later on they say: Tossing such drugs when they expire is doubly hard. One pharmacist at Newton-Wellesley Hospital outside Boston says the 240-bed facility is able to return some expired drugs for credit, but had to destroy about $200,000 worth last year. A commentary in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings cited similar losses at the nearby Tufts Medical Center. Play that out at hospitals across the country and the tab is significant: about $800 million per year. And that doesn’t include the costs of expired drugs at long-term care pharmacies, retail pharmacies and in consumer medicine cabinets. This isn't estimating the same thing as the GP's $330M (hospital waste instead of consumer waste) but $800M is on the same scale, suggesting to me that the marginal cost of drugs might matter some. (I do agree with your point that most of the cost, and especially the most egregious examples like the wasted epi-pens, don't represent real costs because of monopolies.)
- jessriedel 9y ago
  Hey thanks! This is a good clarification. I'm happy to modify my criticism from "the author is strictly off by a factor of 1000" to "the author strongly leads the reader to believe the size of the effect is 1000 times stronger than it really is, but he deftly avoids saying anything that's technically false, and in any case the reader shouldn't care about this since it represents an dead-weight loss of about $2 per person per year, which is less than the value of the reader's time spent reading this article".