This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Pay Now or Pay Later

Ira J. Chasnoff, MD

JAMA. 1991;266(11):1567-1568.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

As a premed student in undergraduate school, I struggled through the economics courses required for graduation, comforting myself with the thought that economics has nothing to do with health care. Twenty-five years later, I have come to recognize the delusion under which I was working. The article by Phibbs et al¹ in this issue of JAMA confirms what many practitioners have long suspected: maternal drug use, especially the use of crack cocaine, is driving the cost of care for the exposed infants beyond any reasonable level.

From a national perspective, the total cost implications of drug and alcohol, and especially cocaine, use during pregnancy elude us, primarily because we really do not know how many exposed infants are being born each year. The earliest study looking at this issue found that 11% of infants born in 36 selected hospitals across the country had . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Departments of Pediatrics and Psychiatry, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, Ill.

Footnotes
Reprint requests to National Association for Perinatal Addiction Research Education, 11 E Hubbard St, Suite 200, Chicago, IL 60611 (Dr Chasnoff).

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?