The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

For quite sometime now, I have been talking about the trend of people in this country who simply will not follow medical advice.

From a 2008 Washington Post article:

“African-Americans have been shown in some studies to be nearly twice as likely to not take their medicines when compared to Caucasians,” study lead author Dr. Olugbenga Ogedegbe, an associate professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine, said in an American Heart Association news release.

And this is with them actually having the medication on hand. So affordability has nothing to do with it.

So what did they do to encourage patients to take their medicine? They gave them gifts.

“Those who received standard high blood pressure information, bi-monthly phone calls reminding them of positive life experiences, and six unexpected gifts by mail (including an umbrella and duffle bag) took their medication 43 percent of the time over 12 months. Patients who just received a workbook on hypertension (high blood pressure) with no additional intervention took their medication 36 percent of the time.”

Fast forward to today and the trend of paying people to take care of themselves has continued.

“It’s better to spend money on medication adherence for patients, rather than having them boomerang in and out of the hospital,” said Valerie Fleishman, executive director of the New England Healthcare Institute, a research organization, who said that about one-tenth of hospital admissions and one-quarter of nursing home admissions result from incorrect adherence to medication. “Financial incentives are a critical piece of the solution.”

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.

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,” she said. Or she would “take two in a day,” and develop bruises from uncontrolled internal bleeding.

But in the six-month lottery program, she pocketed about $300. “You got something for taking it,” Ms. Parker said. Suddenly, she said, “I was taking it regularly, I was doing so good.”

So let me get this straight: you are suffering from a disease that could end your life and someone has to pay you to take your medicine?

I can understand the some medications out there can be a drag to take because of some of their draining side effects. But in the end, if someone has to pay you to want to stay alive, that is A) ridiculous, B) a complete waste of billions of dollars and resources that could be routed to people who want get well, and C) self-demeaning because if you have to pay someone to improve themselves, be prepared to pay that income for the rest of their lives.

And you notice that this trend was not mentioned once in the whole recent health insurance debate.

Back in 1997, then President Clinton became so “concerned” that millions of kids were not signed up for government health care Medicaid that pushed for an order to force kids into the program. The only thing you and I heard throughout the whole recent health care debate is “But there are so many kids out there who are uninsured…”

The resources were already there, ladies and gentleman. All they had to do was sign up.

At the end of the day, there are just some people who simply prefer to take their chances swimming in choppy waters rather than reach for the life raft. The only people that do not have a problem with that are the people who are out there swimming.