discarded hospital supply warehouse
Credit: Tristan Spinski
Just outside of Portland, Maine, there’s a 15,000-square-foot warehouse that’s packed with reasons the U.S. health care system costs so much: Shelves climb floor to ceiling, stacked with tubs overflowing with unopened packages of syringes, diabetes supplies and shiny surgical instruments that run hundreds of dollars apiece. There are boxes of IV fluids and bags of ostomy supplies and kits with everything you’d need to perform an obstetrics surgery.
Help Us Investigate Wasted Health Care Dollars
Experts say the United States might be squandering a quarter of the money spent on health care. That’s an estimated $765 billion a year. Do you believe you’ve encountered this waste? Tell us here.
This, however, isn’t a story of about the crippling price of medical supplies. This is about the high cost of medical supplies that hospitals throw away.
On a recent snowy day the warehouse’s 65-year-old proprietor, Elizabeth McLellan, gave an indignant accounting: She yanked a urinary catheter out […]
How would you like to make 1,000 times your investment? And article here on the Schwartzreport showed how the federal government spent $3.1 million to test the efficacy of drugs past their expiration dates and found many, many , many were still effective… to the tune of $3.1 Billion with a B.
So bet a thousand bucks and you are a millionaire. Sound good? Oh, darn. It is working in reverse, and thus we say adieu to the ‘middle class’, parent, by parent, generation by generation. It is olde news, but ten years ago when I did the research (if I recall correctly) the majority of people spend 90% of their medical expense in the last TWO WEEKS of life.
Stephan is not joking about a system that profits from the sick… is just that.