Well doesn't that just say it all?
Law of Unintended Implications
The idea, which is being embraced by doctors, pharmacy companies, insurers and researchers, is that paying modest financial incentives up front [paying people money to take medicine or to comply with prescribed treatment] can save much larger costs of hospitalization.
Darwin. Call your office.
Before the program, Chiquita Parker, a 25-year-old single mother with lupus, too ill to continue her job with special needs children, repeatedly made medication mistakes, although she knows she depends on warfarin to prevent clots than can cause strokes, paralysis, or death.
“I would forget to take it,” and feel “like I couldn’t breathe,”
And that wasn’t enough to make you pull up your socks and, oh, I dunno, write it the fuck down?
“I really went backward,” Ms. Parker said, after her participation ended. “I’m just forgetting all over again.”
Apparently not.
Skeptics question if payments can be coercive...
whaaa???!?
“Will others think, ‘If I behave like a potential noncomplier, I’ll get money for taking medication?’
Oh Noes! That would never occurr to anyone!!lebeohhell.... how does one “act noncompliant?” just, yanno, for interest’s sake...
And once you start paying people to take medication, when do you stop paying them?”
And where do ya stop? $1,000 for getting their broken leg set? $10,000 for an angioplasty? $100,000 for cardiac surgery? [hey—that shiite’s uncomfortable!]
In a Philadelphia program people prescribed warfarin, an anti-blood-clot medication, can win $10 or $100 each day they take the drug — a kind of lottery using a computerized pillbox to record if they took the medicine and whether they won that day.
So if ya take the pill out of the computerized pill box and sell it on the street toss it to the dog, ya still “win”—right?
Wow. When we made every individual’s “health” everyone else’s financial problem, who woulda seen this problem coming?
I must be a virulent right-wing curmudgeon. Seems to me, if you keep forgetting to take meds that save your life, you probably shouldn’t be out on the street or living your own life.
Warfarin - called Coumadin when it’s given to people (warfarin is when you give it to rats so they fall over dead) - costs us about $1/day.
So they’re gonna give people “$10 or $100” (why bother to narrow it down - it’s only gummint money - and they print whatever they need) to take a $1 pill.
Only Democrats could come up with such a harebrained scheme.
““You got something for taking it,” Ms. Parker said. Suddenly, she said,...
< volume up to 120 dB > YOU GET TO KEEP ON LIVING!!!< resume volume >
PS: It wasn’t even necessary in the news story to mention that she’s a single mother.
Sometimes I feel like the little girl who fell down a rabbit-hole and ended up in some sort of world where nothing made sense, except to the people who lived there.
Posted by ZZMike on 06/15/10 at 08:59 PM
Next entry: Of Greasy Rats and Oily Ships
Previous entry: ToDaZeD Dots
