Just about every day you can find a story about the elderly and how it is finally coming out that they have drug and alcohol problems too.
Government inspectors told Medicare officials need to do more to stop doctors from prescribing powerful psychiatric drugs to nursing home patients with dementia, an unapproved practice that has flourished despite repeated government warnings.
So-called antipsychotic drugs are designed to help control hallucinations, delusions and other abnormal behavior in people suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but they're also given to hundreds of thousands of elderly nursing home patients in the U.S. to pacify aggressive behavior related to dementia. Drugs like AstraZeneca's Seroquel and Eli Lilly's Zyprexa are known for their sedative effect, often putting patients to sleep.
But the drugs can also increase the risk of death in seniors, prompting the Food and Drug Administration to issue multiple warnings against prescribing the drugs for dementia. Antipsychotics raise blood sugar and cholesterol, often resulting in weight gain.
An inspector has challenged that the Medicare program should begin penalizing nursing homes that inappropriately prescribe antipsychotics. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services provides health coverage to nearly 80 million senior, poor or disabled Americans.
HHS Inspector General Daniel Levinson proposed that Medicare force nursing homes to pay for drugs that are prescribed inappropriately, and potentially bar nursing homes that don't use antipsychotics appropriately from Medicare.
A report issued in May found that 83 percent of Medicare claims for antipsychotics were for residents with dementia, the condition specifically warned against in the drugs' labeling. Fourteen percent of all nursing home residents, nearly 305,000 patients, were prescribed antipsychotics.
Doctors are permitted to prescribe drugs for off-label uses, though it is illegal for drug companies to promote uses that haven't been cleared by the FDA. In recent years several pharmaceutical companies have paid huge fines to the Department of Justice in cases involving off-label marketing of antipsychotics.
In January 2009, Eli Lilly & Co. Inc. agreed to plead guilty and pay $1.4 billion for illegal promotion of Zyprexa, including marketing to nursing home doctors.
Protest Wall Street that! Doctors need to treat patients not medicate them.