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Haloperidol

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The most striking aspect of the financial overview of medicine was the limitations of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Even before the lecture, it was clear to me that from the inception of the law that care accessibility would be prioritized over cost and quality. However, the lecture helped me realize how myopic my understanding of the consequences were for patients. To elaborate, let’s take for example the antipsychotic drug, Haloperidol. Haloperidol is a 1st generation typical butryophenone, which is often used in the treatment of schizophrenia. It is a commonly used drug, but it also been noted to have the worst side effects in its drug class. This is remarkable, and makes one question why physicians, who are well-aware of these consequences, continue to prescribe the drug. The answer in part, …show more content…

Simply back to where we started prior to the ACA. The best treatments are still only available to the top earners in the population, while the rest will have to make do. Unfortunately, those who need care are often the ones with the least access. We touched on antipsychotics, but a brief look at the Walmart prescription program indicates medications for hypertension, obesity, depression, and other common conditions. These are conditions that have been associated with low socioeconomic status, due to its connection to poorer diet, exercise, and lifestyle habits. Poorer health, in turn, limits an individual’s ability to work at jobs that enable better care access. As such, a subset of our patient population has no other option than to use medication that is less than ideal, leading to worse outcomes. To shift the balance in our healthcare ecosystem, cost must be incurred at some level. In financial terms, this is an investment period in which our system can refocus the business model to address care deficits in patient sub-populations. In humane terms, it simply means that we are going to better provide care to the people who most need

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