Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 16, 1993 TAG: 9307160079
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Based on 1991 statistics, the study found that of the $21.6 billion Medicaid paid for hospital care, $4.2 billion - just under 20 percent - was for care attributable to substance abuse.
If further studies show the same ratio for all U.S. health-care expenditures, then the nation is spending close to $200 billion a year on care caused by substance abuse, said center President Joseph A. Califano Jr., former secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
"Substance abuse is public-health-enemy number one in America," said Califano. "The scourge of drug abuse is color-blind, gender-neutral and oblivious to class status," and "it is devastating our health-care system."
Califano said the costs result not only from direct steps to deal with substance abuse, such as detoxification, but from treatment of diseases such as cirrhosis of the liver from drinking, lung cancer from smoking and AIDS from use of infected drug needles.
Califano said the 20-percent estimate in what he called the first comprehensive study of the subject is probably low, since the use of alcohol, drugs and tobacco is often underreported: sometimes because of confidentiality rules or patient embarrassment; sometimes for fear insurance payment will be endangered. Moreover, he said, costs of treating innocent third parties (such as a person injured by a drunken driver's car) are not included in the calculations.
Among other major findings of the study, financed primarily by the non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation, are:
Substance-abusing Medicaid patients who are admitted to the hospital for other reasons generally stay twice as long as others with the same primary diagnosis but no substance-abuse problem.
Half of pediatric AIDS cases are caused by parents' intravenous drug use.
Eighty-seven percent of lung cancer is attributable to smoking; 72 percent of chronic pancreatitis is due to alcohol; and 65 percent of strokes among younger Americans are related to either cigarettes or cocaine.
Treatment of burns, pneumonia and other conditions requires hospital stays more than twice as long for patients who are also substance abusers than for those who are not.
by CNB