If you're wondering who's paying for all that ivermectin--you are

[Nevilledog]

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Kiera Butler
@kieraevebutler
Short thread: I wrote about how insurers are paying tens of millions of dollars for ineffective ivermectin prescriptions for Covid. Here's who else is paying: You! https://motherjones.com/politics/2022/01/if-youre-wondering-whos-paying-for-all-that-ivermectin-you-are/… 1/

motherjones.com
If you’re wondering who’s paying for all that ivermectin—you are
Study finds insurers and taxpayers shelled out more than $130 million for a drug that doesn’t work.
1:00 PM · Jan 20, 2022

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/01/if-youre-wondering-whos-paying-for-all-that-ivermectin-you-are/

Doctors have known for more than a year now that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin isn’t effective against Covid. The FDA has explicitly warned against prescribing it to Covid patients, but many physicians still do—and public and private insurance companies are paying for it. A study published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that this drug has cost insurance companies more than a hundred million dollars. “People are really annoyed with insurance, that they don’t cover things that are evidence-based,” says lead author Kao-Ping Chua, an assistant professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. “And at the same time, now here’s an example of insurance covering something that’s not evidence-based.”

Last August, Chua noticed an alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that noted a dramatic increase in ivermectin prescriptions during the pandemic. Before 2020, ivermectin prescription rates from US doctors were low—just a few thousand a week for parasitic diseases like scabies. Yet by the week ending August 13, 2021, as the Delta variant began to sweep the United States and ivermectin advocates proliferated, that number had skyrocketed to 88,000 prescriptions. Chua recalls, “I thought to myself, ” Chua recalls, “I really hope insurance is not paying for that.”

No such luck. Chua’s team looked at an insurance database of 5 million patients with private insurance and 1.2 million with Medicare Advantage from December 1, 2020, through March 31, 2021. They identified about 5600 ivermectin prescriptions and found that private insurers paid 61 percent of the claims and Medicare Advantage paid 74 percent—roughly $36 and $39 respectively. Multiplying those costs by weekly prescription figures from the CDC alert, the team found that insurers would have paid roughly $2.5 million in one week alone. Once multiplied out over the course of a year, the costs added up to nearly $130 million.

The private insurance expenditures are wasteful, says Chua, but the Medicare costs are even more troubling because they’re “effectively forcing all Americans to subsidize that spending” for a drug that doesn’t work. But that’s not all. Chua’s finding is actually an underestimate of taxpayer money going to ivermectin: The database that he used didn’t include Medicaid expenditures. “If you included the Medicaid plan spending, that $2.5 million dollars would be a lot higher,” says Chua.

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[captain queeg]

1. I didn't realize people were getting prescriptions from their doctors

Or at least it was rare. There’s a feed store near me, I’ve thought about going down there and seeing if they carry it and if staff is friendly find out how many people are buying it.

[marshall]

2. My doctor prescribed it for me last year

With my insurance plan it cost $1.95. I ended up having very mild symptoms, although my oxygen levels dipped to 91%. I have no idea if that was due to my being fully vaccinated, the ivermectin, or the monoclonal antibodies infusion I received by two nurse who came to my home.