Adderall For Healthy Kids: A Cost Shift To Medicaid From School Budgets?
"Doctors in Georgia are prescribing ADHD medications to help low-income children struggling in elementary school, even when they do not have an attention deficit disorder, reports a front-page article in Tuesday’s New York Times.
...{Melissa Carter, executive director of the Barton Child Law and Policy Center at Emory University in Atlanta} points out that prescribing stimulants to kids without attention disorder is not necessarily a mainstream trend, but what is clear is that “parents, teachers, caregivers and even entire systems have a growing appetite to use drugs. There’s an avalanche leading towards meds as the only solution.” That may have something to do with the years of austerity cuts to education in Georgia, which have led to larger class size, shorter school days and furloughs for teachers, says Carter.
But she says that unlike investments in schools, which can give students lifelong skills for coping and adjusting, medications may offer “the immediate satisfaction of behavioral control, but you have side effects, and you’re not giving the child any skills to help them function. Are these kids going to have to be medicated for life?”
Tim Sweeney, director of health policy for the Georgia Budget & Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Atlanta, adds that Dr. Anderson’s dilemma is “an indication of a big picture need for increased investment in secondary services around education, like tutors and counselors.” To the extent that additional costs are “being born by Medicaid for prescriptions that are replacing those services, there is potentially a cost shift.”
http://capsules.kaiserhealthnews.org/index.php/2012/10/adderall-for-healthy-kids-a-cost-shift-to-medicaid/
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