A federally financed study finds that kids getting care through Medicaid get four times as many antipsychotic drugs as kids covered by private insurance. What’s the first question you’d ask?

Here was Duff Wilson‘s question, in the second paragraph of a front-page story in Saturday’s New York Times:

“Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?”

Two grafs in, and any pretense of objectivity is lost. Wilson and his editors obviously believe these drugs are bad, and that overuse is a serious problem. He follows this question immediately by noting that these drugs have serious side effects, the FDA is discussing the risks for children, and so on.

Here’s the question an objective reporter would have asked: Are Medicaid kids getting too many antipsychotics, or are middle-class kids getting too few?

It’s possible, as Wilson argues in what is supposed to be a news story, not an opinion piece, that  Medicaid kids are over-medicated because drugs are cheaper than talk therapy, and it’s a good way to get these kids out of the doctor’s office with minimal expense and effort.

It’s just as possible that middle-class families, many of whom share Wilson’s fear of psychiatric drugs, are overly resistant to their use, and thus kids who should get them are not getting them.

If you think I’m being ornery, or on some anti-Times kick, let me cite a little support for my position. Wilson doesn’t get around to quoting the researcher who led the study until almost 1,000 words into his 1,300-word story. In other words, nearly at the end.

That researcher, Stephen Crystal of Rutgers, tells Wilson he does “not have clear evidence to form an opinion on whether or not children on Medicaid were being overtreated. ‘Medicaid kids are subject to a lot of stresses that lead to behavior issues which can be hard to distinguish from more serious psychiatric conditions,’ he said. ‘It’s very hard to pin down.’”

Dr. Gabrielle Carlson, a child psychiatrist at the Stony Brook School of Medicine who was apparently not involved in the research, speculated to Wilson that “maybe Medicaid kids are getting better treatment.”

I’m sure Wilson and his editors think they produced an objective piece of reporting. But their bias is not only clear from the second graf, it also contradicts what the director of the research told the writer.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 at 7:20 pm and is filed under About Journalism, Health & Medicine Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.