Gov. Gavin Newsom, spend that $6.4 billion from Prop. 1 on treatment that works
Orange County RegisterApr 07, 2024
Hey,
Now they’re holding their breath, especially here in
We’ve told you about so many people who’ve died in these facilities for lack of proper, or really any, medical care. Please, please, not more heartbreak! How about treating addiction as the life-threatening medical condition it is, and spending our billions on what we know works best?
To that end, come with us to
Since the Affordable Care Act mandated that addiction treatment be covered by health insurance, drug overdoses have more than doubled.
In 2014, before the mandate took effect and ne’er-do-wells flocked to the addiction treatment gold rush, there were 4,521 overdose deaths in
In 2022, after the mandate took effect and despite new laws and crackdowns, there were 11,002 overdose deaths, according to data from the
Yes, fentanyl happened. But we’re clearly doing something wrong. We clearly need to do something better.
Only slightly more than half of treatment facilities offered any kind of medication-assisted treatment, the gold standard in care, according to data from the
Can’t we make them do better?
Non-medical
So many people have taken their loved ones to licensed treatment homes thinking they’re full-fledged medical facilities. They’re not. In
We told you about
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Folks who enter licensed rehabs are supposed to see a doctor within 24 hours in
Back to the expressly non-medical rehab bit. They usually have only six beds. How can anyone afford the critical staff needed to oversee the deadly dangers of detox with only six beds? When they’re in tract homes in residential neighborhoods? The scale and setting just don’t make sense.
Addiction treatment may be the only slice of the healthcare universe where folks in public programs have a far better shot at success than those in luxury, private-pay, insurance money-driven programs. Why? Because public programs must embrace medication-assisted treatment, the gold standard still rejected by too many private programs. Because they spend public money and are much more closely monitored by public officials. Because they’re not sold as sober-vacation destinations to lure users from far and wide — and often paying for airline tickets if folks’ insurance is good — as so many luxury rehabs are.
No carrot, no stick
Forgive folks for being nervous about what’s going to come out of Prop. 1.
With the best of intentions, voters passed Proposition 47 a decade ago, reducing a great many drug-related offenses from felonies to misdemeanors. That kept a great many low-level drug offenders out of jail. The money saved on incarceration was supposed to pay for effective addiction treatment, among other things, reformers said.
Since then, there has been an interesting, and perhaps tragic, convergence of events. Drug offense arrests plunged 85%, while overdose deaths more than doubled.
The great treatment didn’t materialize.
Look. No one wants folks struggling with addiction stuck in prisons or institutions. Traditional hospitalization is out, too — it was nixed decades ago because it’s so expensive. But with this new
We’ll be talking to experts about all this over the next few days. Suffice to say that addiction isn’t “cured” in 30 or 60 or 90 days. It’s a lifetime condition, the experts say, and sobriety can take many years to attain.
Despite myriad new laws passed in the wake of SCNG’s coverage over the past seven years, the story on the street remains much the same. I can still open a rehab in
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