Racial, economic disparities found in buprenorphine prescriptions
Buprenorphine for opioid use disorder is much less likely to be prescribed to patients who are black or who do not have health insurance, an analysis of two national surveys shows.
Researchers analyzed data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey from 2004 to 2015, including 13.4 million visits in which buprenorphine was prescribed. The analysis was published as a research letter in JAMA Psychiatry.
From 2012 to 2015, the number of ambulatory visits involving buprenorphine rose from 0.04% to 0.36%. Black patients were 77% less likely to receive a prescription for buprenorphine at their visit – even after adjustment for payment method, sex, and age – while the number of prescription received by white patients was considerably higher than for patients of any other ethnicity, wrote Pooja A. Lagisetty, MD, and coauthors.
, and the age group with the highest incidence of buprenorphine prescriptions was 30-50 years.
Self-pay and private health insurance were the most common payment methods, but the number of self-paying patients receiving buprenorphine prescriptions dramatically increased from 585,568 in 2004-2007 to 5.3 million in 2012-2015.
“This finding in nationally representative data builds on a previous study that reported buprenorphine treatment disparities on the basis of race/ethnicity and income in New York City,” said Dr. Lagisetty of the department of medicine at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and coauthors.
However, they acknowledged that it was unclear whether the treatment disparity might in fact reflect a difference in the prevalence of opioid use disorder across ethnicities.
Commenting on the differences in payment methods, the authors noted that, despite the enactment of mental health parity legislation and the expansion of Medicaid, the proportion of self-pay visits remained relatively unchanged across the study period.
“A recent study demonstrated that half of the physicians prescribing buprenorphine in Ohio accepted cash alone, and our findings suggest that this practice may be widespread and may be associated with additional financial barriers for low-income populations,” the researchers wrote. “With rising rates of opioid overdoses, it is imperative that policy and research efforts specifically address racial/ethnic and economic differences in treatment access and engagement.”
No conflicts of interest were declared.
SOURCE: Lagisetty P et al. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019 May 8. doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.0876.
