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Demographic Characteristics and Opioid Prescribing—Reply
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| Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings. |
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In Reply: Drs Maserejian and McKinlay argue that the differences in prescribing that we noted for white vs nonwhite patients could be attributable to differences in SES. This is a possibility, given that we had only limited information about each patient's SES and therefore could not adjust for it completely. The National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey did record the type of insurance each patient carried, which is a crude measure of SES. Adjustment for this measure led to only a minimal reduction in effect size (for example, the odds ratio for receiving an opioid medication for black vs white patients with pain was 0.635 before adjustment and 0.646 after adjustment). Full adjustment for SES might be expected to attenuate this effect a bit more, but probably not completely.
The degree to which the race/ethnicity gap we observed is due to SES, however, should not substantially affect the health care . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Mark J. Pletcher, MD, MPH
mpletcher@epi.ucsf.edu Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics University of California, San Francisco
Michael A. Kohn, MD, MPP
Emergency Department Mills-Peninsula Medical Center Burlingame, California
Ralph Gonzales, MD, MSPH
Division of General Internal Medicine Department of Medicine University of California, San Francisco
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