Wealth and med choice: the antipsychotics

Interesting results, annoyingly inflammatory interpretation ...

Children on Medicaid Found More Likely to Get Antipsychotics - NYTimes.com

New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.

Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?...

These sorts of studies irritate me. Not because they're unimportant, but because they are relatively easy to do, they are prone to error in interpreting diagnostic data, the level of discussion is usually weak, and there's rarely any follow-up. To be meaningful we'd have to fund far more difficult and expensive ethnographic studies (aka "qualitative research"). We rarely do that.

I have two early thoughts about this particular study. The relatively trivial one concerns the "conditions" clause. This usually refers to ICD-9 coded diagnoses (sometimes DSM coded, which is a hacked offshoot of ICD-9). Since these diagnoses are crafted to meet insurance reimbursement rules they are strongly influenced by payment source. So they are not a reliable data source for this kind of study.

The more interesting discussion point concerns what is meant by "actually need them" and "cost-effective". We have personal experience, as we have one child whose consulting pediatric psychiatrist long offered the use of anti-psychotic meds. We were able to avoid their use, but only because we have relatively large resources in many dimensions. Managing some autism-spectrum/"explosive child" disorders without, or even with, the most powerful available medications is extraordinarily challenging.

Our choice to forego their use was not based on a great dislike of these medications. If we had failed we would have used them. We might need them in the future. It is rather that we had relatively great, but not inexhaustible, private resources. The differentiator was not what our insurance could pay, but rather what we by virtue of training, education, income and temperament were able to do.

No society, not even Sweden or Norway, would be able to provide similar resources to every needful child. We should expect antipsychotic medications to be used more often among those with fewer private resources.

Four times more often? That does need to be investigated -- but remember that the billing diagnostic data is suspect, and that many of these conditions have a hereditary compoment. They may impact the parents, and impacted parents will be far more common in the medicaid population (because, of course, their income will be very low).

Now that I've said all of the above, I'll switch to the other side of the debate. There are almost no medicaid psychiatrists, and even fewer medicaid pediatric psychiatrists. Heck, there are almost no psychiatrists anywhere. There is a smoldering crisis in the expert psychiatric care of poor children. I would be very interested in a study comparing the use of antipsychotic medications in medicaid American children vs. a comparable Canadian group. Even with all of the objections I've raised, I can believe this is a major contributor to the findings. We need either to pay medicaid psychiatrists far more money, or we need to find an alternative way to deliver psychiatric-type services to this population.