[In 2001] pharmaceuticals accounted for nearly one in every ten dollars spent on
health care, nearly twice what it had been two decades earlier. The government
agency that pays the nation's Medicare and Medicaid bills projected drug
spending would soar to 14 percent of all health care costs by 2010 unless
something was done to check the upward spiral.

What was behind runaway drug spending? Prices rose only modestly, so that wasn't
the major problem. Utilization soared. Physicians prescribed medicines at a
breakneck pace to an aging, overweight, and out-of-shape American people
suffering (to judge from prescription patterns) in near epidemic proportions
from high cholesterol, high blood pressure, allergies, depression, arthritis,
and diabetes.

[...]

An unprecedented rise in drug industry promotional spending stoked the
grassroots demand for the pricier drugs. ….

As drug entrepreneurs have known since the days when traveling salesmen pushed
unregulated patent medicines at circus sideshows, advertising works. Consumption
of the latest antacids, anticholesterol agents, antidepressants, antihistamines,
and painkillers reached unprecedented levels. The average American consumed
eleven prescriptions in 2000, up from seven just a decade earlier. ....

Study after study appeared in the medical literature documenting widespread
misuse of medicine by seniors, whether they got their drugs in hospitals,
nursing homes, or physician offices. Anywhere from 12 to 49 percent of
prescriptions were deemed "inappropriate", according to the studies. .... One
survey of eleven drugs whose labels specifically cautioned against their use in
seniors found that more than one million elderly individuals took at least one
of those inappropriate medicines.

Merrill Goozner, _The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs_
(University of California Press, 2004), pp. 232, 233

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10083.php

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10083/10083.ch08.php

[Thanks to Chris Willmore for the tip. Journalist Merrill Goozner (1950-) blogs
at www.gooznews.com/ . This excerpt is from chapter 9 of _The $800 Million
Pill_. The full text of chapter 8 - possibly the best chapter of the book - can
be read online at the ucpress site.]