How Prescription Drug Abuse Costs You Money
One study puts the potential overall cost of painkiller abuse at more than $70 billion a year. Pill addicts who shop around for doctors to score prescriptions cost insurers $10,000 to $15,000 apiece. The toll in lost productivity: $42 billion. The criminal justice bill: $8.2 billion. It all adds up.
Over the past decade, prescription drug abuse in the U.S. has increased rapidly, to the point that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now labels the problem an “epidemic.”
More than 36,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2008, the most recent year for which data has been analyzed, according to the CDC, only a few thousand shy of the total killed by car crashes. Of those drug overdoses, prescription drugs were involved in over 20,000 cases.
Of particular concern are prescription painkillers like methadone, oxycodone, and hydrocodone, which the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud describes as “by far” the most-abused prescription drugs. Oxycodone and hydrocodone are commonly marketed under the brand names OxyContin and Vicodin, respectively.
Sales of prescription painkillers since 1999 have more than tripled, and their involvement in overdose deaths has spiked as well, from 4,000 cases in 1999 to 15,000 in 2008. That’s more than heroin and cocaine combined.
“There’s no doubt that this is a growing cost to society,” said Kevin Sabet, a former senior advisor at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. “We’re in the midst of an epidemic, and it’s really time for America to wake up.”
As the human costs mount, so too do the economic ones. The Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, an alliance of consumer groups, insurance companies and government agencies, put the cost of prescription painkiller abuse for insurers at up to $72.5 billion in a 2007 study, and other reports show the abuse of such drugs has risen in the years since.