Disabled Adults in US Often Cannot Afford to Take Drugs as Prescribed
By Alison McCook
Originally published by Reuters Health, July 8, 2002
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Approximately 1.3 million adults with disabilities in the US cannot afford to take medications in the manner prescribed, new survey findings show.
"Prescription drug coverage is unavailable or inadequate for a large number of adults with disabilities," Dr. Jae Kennedy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign told Reuters Health. "We have to reduce drug costs for consumers, particularly heavy users of prescription drugs."
Dr. Kennedy and his co-author Christopher Erb, base their findings on a study of 25,805 disabled US adults who were surveyed about their use of prescription drugs. The data were then extrapolated to the estimated population of disabled adults living in the US.
Reporting in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the authors found that 70% of US disabled adults—a total of 28 million people—say they have received at least one prescription. However, almost 4 million of them report that they do not always take the medications as prescribed.
Of those not taking the medications as indicated, 1.3 million say they do so because of the cost associated with the drugs. Some reported not filling the prescription, while others either did not refill the prescription or did not fill it completely, or took the medicine less often because of how much it cost.
Uninsured adults were four times as likely as those who had private insurance to not take their medications as directed, and younger disabled adults were 10 times less likely than their older peers to follow prescriptions properly.
Dr. Kennedy said that the disabled population is unlikely to be helped by the efforts of Congress to extend drug benefits to those who receive Medicare, for only 27% of the disabled population surveyed in this study receives Medicare.
As such, the cost of drugs may only decrease through cost controls or the expansion of insurance coverage to include those who might be otherwise ineligible, Dr. Kennedy noted. "Most current policy initiatives favor expanding insurance benefits, but we also need to increase insurance eligibility for adults with disabilities," he added.
The authors note that the problem may be even bigger than shown, given that respondents tend to overestimate how often they take their drugs as directed.
Furthermore, the study does not determine how many people take their drugs "at great personal cost," the authors write, meaning they forgo food or other needed expenses to buy their medication.
