Ivermectin stupidity is costly in money and life.

[a322x1n]

Isn't it amazing the damage disinformation from a troll farm can do?
They've made total fools of nearly half of the American public, and
much of the rest of the world.

<https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/insurance/column-a-new-study-calculates-
the-incredible-cost-of-ivermectin-stupidity/ar-AASNasJ?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U
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<https://tinyurl.com/y7uxyy3j>

Column: A new study calculates the incredible cost of ivermectin
stupidity. Opinion by Michael Hiltzik - Yesterday 12:54 PM.

Acouple of things are known about ivermectin, the anti-parasitic
treatment being promoted by a clutch of conspiracy-mongering mountebanks
as a COVID-19 treatment.

First, it doesn't work on COVID. Second, despite that fact,
prescriptions for the drug have rocketed higher — from 3,600 a week
pre-pandemic to 88,000 in one sample week in mid-August, according to
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Third, the publicizing of ivermectin by anti-vaccine and anti-government
activists duped naïve people to take a veterinary preparation of the
drug, producing a spike in calls to poison control centers.

This is not the type of high-dollar item that an insurer is normally
going to pay attention to. But the cost of inexpensive drugs, when
dispensed frequently, can cumulatively add up. This is not the type of
high-dollar item that an insurer is normally going to pay attention to.
But the cost of inexpensive drugs, when dispensed frequently, can
cumulatively add up.

Kao-Ping Chua, University of Michigan
Now, thanks to researchers at the University of Michigan and Boston
University, we also know the financial toll of the ivermectin craze. In
a research letter published Thursday by the Journal of the American
Medical Assn., they estimated that Medicare and private insurers wasted
an estimated $130 million last year on ivermectin prescriptions for
COVID.

"That's not small potatoes," the lead author of the letter, Kao-Ping
Chua of the University of Michigan Medical School, told me. The unit
cost of ivermectin pills is low — about $1 to $1.50 per pill — but the
volume of wasteful prescriptions adds up.

The $129.7 million spent on wasteful ivermectin, the letter's authors
calculated, is more than the annual Medicare spending on unnecessary
imaging for lower back pain, a low-value diagnostic order that has been
widely researched. No one has paid much attention to the ivermectin
expense, however.

The researchers' estimate may even be low for two main reasons. One is
that their estimate is based on spending by private insurers and
Medicare, but not Medicaid, which also covers the drug.

Second, they arrived at their figure by extrapolating from that one week
highlighted by the CDC, when the average of new cases in the U.S. was
running at about 150,000 a day. On Jan. 12, the daily average of new
cases was more than 782,000. If ivermectin claims are tracking new
cases, Chua says, then they may be getting filled at more than five
times as often as last August.

Finally, consider the indirect cost. "By decreasing financial barriers
to ivermectin, insurers are essentially facilitating access to a drug
that some people use as a substitute for COVID vaccination," Chua
observes. "In that sense, they could be raising their own costs for
COVID complications."

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Ivermectin prescriptions shot up from about 3,600 per week before the
pandemic to 88,000 in mid-August, after anti-vaccine promoters talked it
up as a COVID treatment. But it's useless against the disease. (Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention) That's correct. Ivermectin has
become just one more item in the medicine chest promoted by the
anti-vaccine crowd. The most serious study found it has "no effect
whatsoever" on COVID-19. Ivermectin pushers do argue, as Chua noted,
that it's an alternative to vaccination. That's not a conclusion based
on science, but an instrument of ideologues.

As with the entire crusade against COVID vaccination, promoting
ivermectin is a reckless attack on public health and a disservice to
victims who are duped into making bad choices for their health and
safety.

The researchers' letter points to what is fundamentally a breakdown in
our system for overseeing drug prescribing.

It's true that ivermectin is approved by the Food and Drug
Administration as a treatment for parasitic diseases. (Its more common
veterinary use is as a deworming preparation for cats, dogs and
livestock.) It's also true that doctors are generally permitted to
prescribe any drug for "off-label" use — that is, for conditions for
which it wasn't originally approved.

But that doesn't mean that pharmacists and insurers are legally bound to
fill and pay for those prescriptions. Pharmacists are entitled to refuse
to fill prescriptions they believe aren't intended for legitimate
medical purposes. Indeed, some pharmacists have reportedly turned away
patients who show up with ivermectin prescriptions for COVID. Insurers
make judgments all the time about whether they'll cover certain drugs
and for which patients.

But there are no indications that Medicare or private insurers exercised
this crucial gatekeeping function on ivermectin. The probable reason is
that each individual prescription is relatively cheap — about $35 to $50
for a 20-pill script, adding together customers' out-of-pocket co-pays
and the insurance reimbursements.

"This is not the type of high-dollar item that an insurer is normally
going to pay attention to," Chua says — a cancer drug, for example, that
may run to tens of thousands of dollars per month or per year. "But the
cost of inexpensive drugs, when dispensed frequently, can cumulatively
add up."

Chua says that he was prompted to conduct his study after reading the
CDC's estimate of 88,000 prescriptions in mid-August. "I thought to
myself, 'I hope insurance is not paying for that,'" he says. But it is,
and our entire healthcare system is shouldering the burden.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.