The following post by Liz Scherer, Principal of Digital Copy, LLC, is part of Disruptive Women’s “The Value of Health: Creating Economic Security in the Developing World” series.

Liz Scherer is a digital copywriter, health reporter, medical writer, marketing and social media consultant, blogger and women’s health advocate. With over 25 years experience in the healthcare arena, Liz has worked in the private and public sectors on behalf of web-based and traditional science publishers, public relations and advertising agencies and non-profits.

There’s an elephant in the room: band-aids.

Poverty and its relationship to the provision of and access to healthcare is a global problem. This month, esteemed Disruptive Women in Healthcare bloggers and guest posters are writing on this critical issue with a unique look at the problems abroad. Yet, this has prompted me to look within, for if we can’t address our own problems, how can we possibly be successful at addressing problems outside our immediate borders?

It’s no secret that the divide in the U.S. comes down to socioeconomic status. And while our representatives in Washington continue to battle it out to devise a healthcare reform bill that, for all intents and purposes, may ultimately serve the power lobbies more than the public, a significant proportion of our population is being pummeled into submission with powerful drugs.

According to an article in the New York Times, children from poor families receive antipsychotic medications four times as often as those from wealthier families. What’s more, it appears that these children are likely to receive a prescription for less serious conditions than would commonly prompt a prescription for a wealthier child. The divide: Medicaid versus private insurance.

The underlying message appears to be that if you need to rely on assistance to access health services, that your problems are likelier to be shoved under the rug and “numbified” rather than addressed in a methodical manner. Although this it not necessarily a revelation, some medical experts appear to be “stunned by the disparity in prescribing patterns.” The winning quote in the NYT’s piece is “if it helps keep them in school, maybe it’s not so bad.”

Maybe it’s not so bad on the surface, but the longer-term prognosis appears quite grim. In this particular situation, statistics suggest that as the Medicaid rolls expand, the scope and expense of antipsychotic prescribing could outgrow the budget.

So I’d like to pose the following question as Disruptive Women in Healthcare explores these issues: if we don’t address the underlying challenges that poverty, broken homes and sub-par education pose at home, and how they breed behavioral and physical health issues, how can we develop adequate solutions for the global population? We have become a nation of Band-aids that only cover the problems, not fix them. Short-sighted? Indeed.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 9:01 am and is filed under Access, Disparities, Global Health, Health Reform, Medicare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.