Using Crestor to prevent heart attacks and save lives in apparently healthy people would add nearly $10 billion a year to the nation's medical bill, according to calculations released Monday.
What really caught my attention was this:
About 7 million people nationwide would qualify for treatment under the JUPITER [Crestor treatment in 'healthy' people] protocol, at a cost of about $116 a month — or $9.7 billion a year, Stein says. For that price, the drug would prevent, taken together, about 28,000 heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths each year.
The cost of saving one life, he says, would total about $557,000. Using a generic statin would be much more cost-effective. Stein calculates that, at $5 a month, generics would cost $420 million, or $24,000 to save a life.
According the American Heart Association, in 2004, 451,326 Americans died from Coronary Heart Disease and 150,074 dies from strokes. Using 300,000,000 as a nice round number for the U.S. population and assuming everyone is equally likely to die from a heart attack in a given year (an unrealistic assumption, but go with me here), would you be willing to pay $116 per month to reduce your risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke in a given year from 1 in 499 to 1 in 523?
How about $5 a month***?
***For fun, let's play with the numbers...
I'm guessing a large portion of the adult population would be willing to pay at least $5 a month. To be conservative, let's say 80% of the adults in the U.S. would be willing to give up $5 each month. Adults make up about 75% of the U.S. population, so that's 180,000,000 willing to pay at least $5 per month to save 28,000 lives. $5 per month in perpetuity translates to a present value of $857 per person using a 7% discount rate. Multiplying by the number of people I'm guessing are willing to pay ($857 x 180,000,000) and dividing by the 28,000 lives saved gives an implied value of statistical life of $5.5 million.
