Healthcare Coverage Influences Patient Compliance

Noncompliance is a social health problem the world over, and one study pinpointed a significant reason why intractable pain patients may not comply with their prescribed treatment—failure of having healthcare coverage to pay for treatment.⁶ Of the 225 patients who were studied for intractable pain compliance, 40% did not comply with their prescribed treatment and 15.5% said they did not comply because they couldn’t afford it. Researchers found that cases of non-compliance increased as cost of prescriptions, the number of prescriptions, and the number of doses increased.

Eighty million people are significantly uninsured and approximately 34 million people have no health insurance.⁷ Of the people who are the least able to comply with their intractable pain treatment, elderly and lower socioeconomic populations tend to have the highest incidents of noncompliance because they are the populations who rely on governmental health reimbursement the most. Since governmental health services tend to provide the bare minimum healthcare, elderly and lower socioeconomic populations tend to receive the least amount of money to pay for their care.^7,8