Why do hospitals keep running out of generic drugs?

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There's something strange going on in hospitals. Cheap, common drugs that nurses use every day seem to be constantly hit by shortages. These are often generic drugs that don't seem super complicated to make, things like dextrose and saline (aka sugar water and salt water).

So what's going on? The answer, as with anything in healthcare, is complicated.

On today's show: why hospitals keep running out of generic drugs. The story behind these shortages tells us a lot about how these drugs are made, bought and sold–and, it shows us how these markets can falter without the proper care.

This episode was hosted by Sally Helm and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Willa Rubin, with help from James Sneed and Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Martina Castro. Fact-checking by Dania Suleman. Planet Money's executive producer is Alex Goldmark.

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Transcript

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0:25.3	This is planet money from npr.
0:30.7	I recently talked to a nurse who has been facing a medical economic mystery.
0:37.2	His name is Jared Sibit.
0:39.2	He lives in the Mountain West.
0:40.4	I've been working in emergency and ICU in flight medicine for about 14 years now.
0:45.5	What's flight medicine?
0:46.8	With transport medicine so some days I'm on a helicopter some days I'm on a
0:51.8	fixed-wing aircraft. It's unpredictable, I guess.
0:55.0	You could get somebody who fell off a cliff and broke their leg. You could get a bear mauling,
0:59.2	so it keeps me on my toes.
1:00.5	Jared spoke to us unofficially, as in without clearance from his higher-ups, so we're going to leave the
1:05.8	name of his hospital out, but he works with a mid-sized regional medical center.
1:10.8	And Jared's problem, his medical economic mystery, it actually affects nurses all over the country.
1:17.0	Drugs that they use to treat patients every single day are sometimes just not available.
1:23.0	This has been a part of health care as long as I've been there.
1:26.0	We've had rolling drug shortages of different medications at different times
1:31.0	and for seemingly different reasons.
1:33.2	Often this is happening to the cheapest, oldest, most common drugs.
	...

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