Medical expenditures of children in the United States with fetal alcohol syndrome

Abstract

This paper calculates the medical expenditures for pediatric Medicaid enrollees with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), those with and those without reported intellectual disability (ID). The pediatric portion of the MarketScan® Medicaid Multi-State databases for the years 2003-2005 was used. Children with FAS were identified based on International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification codes. Children without FAS formed the comparison group. Annual mean, median, and 95(th) percentile total expenditures were calculated for those continuously enrolled during 2005. Children with FAS incurred annual mean medical expenditures that were nine times as high as those of children without FAS during 2005 ($16,782 vs. $1,859). ID more commonly was listed as a medical diagnosis among children with FAS than among children in the comparison group (12% vs. 0.5%), and mean expenditures of children with FAS and ID were 2.8 times those of children with FAS but without reported ID. Children with FAS incurred higher medical expenditures compared with children without FAS. A subset of children with FAS who had ID sufficiently serious to be recorded in medical records increased those expenditures still further. Our estimate of mean expenditures for children with FAS was several times higher than previous estimates in the United States.