Kentucky Drawing Wrong Conclusions From Prescription Drug Study
Not that other states or the federal government are any better.
Beth Musgrave at the Herald:
State officials are blustering that the new blame-the-victim legislation to crack down on prescription drugs will solve this problem, but as with everything related to the ludicrous and destructive War on Drugs, it misses the real problem.FRANKFORT — Narcotics were prescribed to adult Medicaid patients in Kentucky more than any other class of drug during the 2000s, according to a new study by the University of Kentucky.
In Eastern Kentucky, where abuse of pain pills has become an epidemic, Medicaid patients received double or triple the quantity of narcotics that patients got in most other Kentucky counties, the study found.
Michael Childress, author of the UK study, said part of the decrease can be attributed to a change in policy for Medicare, the federal health-insurance program primarily for people 65 or older. After 2006, Medicare began to pay for many prescriptions, which might have shifted the bill for some narcotics prescriptions from one government program to another.Hmm. Greedy corporations making obscene profits at the expense of both sick people and the government that tries to help them. Who could have predicted?
"These people could have been getting the same medications, but they weren't paid for by Medicaid," he said.
Childress noted in his report that poor educational attainment, high unemployment and poverty also are found in counties with higher than average numbers of narcotic prescriptions.
"These are deep underlying issues that also have to be addressed," Childress said.
The rise in narcotic prescriptions is also a symptom of a deeper, cultural problem, Ingram said.
People have begun to accept that it's okay to take a pill for every ache and pain, Ingram said. That mentality is reinforced by pharmaceutical companies that encourage patients to ask their doctors for certain medications by name.
"We've set up these transactional relationships with our providers," Ingram said. "Every night we're bombarded with these commercials that tell us, 'If you have this problem, just take this pill.' That's a trend that we've got to, as a state, reverse. We're now seeing the result."
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