Posted on 03/01/2016 10:02:36 PM PST by Citizen Zed
The federal Medicare program and private health insurers waste nearly $3 billion every year buying cancer medicines that are thrown out because many drug makers distribute the drugs only in vials that hold too much for most patients, a group of cancer researchers has found.
The expensive drugs are usually injected by nurses working in doctors’ offices and hospitals who carefully measure the amount needed for a particular patient and then, because of safety concerns, discard the rest.
If drug makers distributed vials containing smaller quantities, nurses could pick the right volume for a patient and minimize waste. Instead, many drug makers exclusively sell one-size-fits-all vials, ensuring that many smaller patients pay thousands of dollars for medicine they are never given, according to researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who published a study on Tuesday in BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
BINGO!
They throw it out because they don’t want to get sued thanks to the government and the ambulance chasers.
.
Exactly, just like food.
Takeda is expected to earn $309 million this year on supplies of Velcade that are discarded, an amount that represents 30 percent of the drug’s overall sales in the United States, the cancer researchers estimated. If Takeda provided an additional vial size of 0.25 milligram, waste would be slashed by 84 percent, also reducing Velcade’s sales in the United States by $261 million annually, the researchers calculated.
Since they provide another vial size in other Countries, they are just flat-out stealing money from US patients. You are right that the "Government" is involved. According to the article, they approved the sale of the product in only one size...wonder what their "cut" was for doing that?
Of course. The cost of producing most drugs is trivial. It's so low that you might just as well call it zero. The true cost of a new drug is in the regulations required to get it approved. For a new cancer drug, that's billions of dollars. Whether the drug companies package the drugs in one ounce containers, which might be the right size for a few patients, or one gallon containers so that there is only one size for all is irrelevant. The cost is in the regulations to approve the drug. This whole article is just a feint go get everyone mad at the drug companies rather than the FDA.
We get our daily Meds from the Navy Dispensary, and they use huge bottles for tiny pills, 1 bottle would hold nearly a year of my Synthyroid. We are DOD MANDATED to use them as Tricare Life. Or Express Scripts when the base does not have the meds. If we don’t use them we have to pay full price for some very expensive meds that are daily takes.
Strange flu shots are all administered from the same bottle. So part of one bottle could be used on the next patient who needed that particular drug in their Cocktail mixture. It’s not contaminated after all.
Each cancer patient has their own Cocktail mixed according to their prior blood work needs. That is a balancing act for the patient and the doctor. Which leads to waste in the meds.
Hell getting older.
What am I supposed to do with meds I have bad reactions to on just 1 or 2 pills? Our Daily Meds come from the Military base, they use huge bottles for every drug, even the tiny ones.
I’m the side effect queen, and have had to throw out more expensive meds than I should have if I’d been given samples in the first place. Then we could weed out the bad reaction drugs in a less expensive way. The Base won’t take them back to dispose of correctly. So you either throw them in the trash or take them to a local private pharmacy to dispose of them. They don’t belong in the landfills or down the toilet in out water supply.
Predisone dose packs have doubled in price, while the loose pills are a 1/4th the cost. Yet doctors are still writing scripts for those blister packs.
Take a good hard look at that crappy Mesh for fallen or prolapsed bladders or hernia repairs it should not even be on the market. Incestuous relationship between the FDA and drug companies. Crestor became #1 because of a slick ad campaign, not that it is a better cholesterol drug. Many of the older cheaper ones work just as well with less side effects.
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