Madison, a supervisor at a retail pharmacy, said it’s easy to get disgusted by the waves of wasted medical goods pouring through the warehouse. He grabbed a $30 walker from the pile. “We’ll get 400 more of them this year,” he said. “Why do we need everyone on Medicare to get a new walker?”

And those pallets of adult diapers stacked high on a shelf? He sells the same type at his pharmacy for $11.99 per package or more. Farren recalled one time they picked up about 100 unopened packages of diapers from the home of a patient who had died. “It was ridiculous,” he said.


McLellan is sensitive about the built-in tension of her mission. The hospitals are casting off useful supplies that would otherwise be sent to a landfill. But they are also donating items that are desperately needed in the developing world. “They are trying to be good stewards in our community and in their world,” she said.

On the flip side, she can’t look past the waste. She said she could fill 15 shipping containers now if she had the $25,000 it cost to send each one overseas.

Hospital officials either declined to comment or, sometimes sheepishly, said some of the waste was unavoidable. Elton Cole, the supply chain manager at Stephens Memorial Hospital in western Maine, said some items, such as a torn exam table, must be replaced to meet infection control guidelines. Same goes for those supplies left in patient rooms. At Stephens, he said, the supplies in the room, such as bandages or gloves, are typically included in the room charge and not billed directly to patients.

Health care finance experts say that while patients might not see the cost in their bills, the wasted supplies boost a hospital’s overhead, which in turn makes everyone’s costs higher.

The waste “contributes a lot to the cost of health care,” Cole said. “It’s pretty phenomenal the tons of product we’re shipping out to Elizabeth’s group.”

Patricia Fallows, who organizes the University of Vermont Medical Center donations to Partners, sent ProPublica a list of the typical shipment. Among the 100 items are a Medline Skin Staple Remover ($100), a box of Carefusion Blood Sets ($100 for 10) and three cases of unexpired Ethicon sutures ($431 per box). (ProPublica is using the list price of the products online, since the prices hospitals and other medical facilities pay vary widely depending on their individual deals with suppliers.) Officials at the medical center said the waste is a tiny percentage of their budget and some of it is unavoidable.

We called the National Rural Health Association in Leawood, Kansas, to see if they could use anything on this list.

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