WASHINGTON — The Senate is likely to pass a comprehensive bill to address the opioid crisis in the coming weeks. The House did so in June.
But the finish line on that long-discussed priority remains a long way off.
Lawmakers have left untouched many of the bill’s most contentious issues, like debates over patient privacy and expensive changes to Medicaid payments for addiction treatment. There’s no sign yet they’ll iron out those issues before the Senate votes.
About the Author Reprints
lol. i can remember when the nys legislature was certain i stop would solve all problems regarding opioids. the continuing escalation of failure in pain and addiction care wont be solved bt technocapitalists in Congress. Throwing money at problems ignores social political and moral progress.
Somebody needs to tell the fools in Congress to gtfo of the doctors office. Senators are far too incompetent to implement anything useful
This is really too little too late. In a country that relies on alternate facts, random beliefs, and ignorance to ensure corporate profitability, this should have been fixed 20 or more years ago. Thanks to industry interference and corruption, this issue was allowed to fester, as the American public, was Gas Lighted.
There are simply too many conflicting agendas here. The immense profits, created a free for all of misinformation, and fact free discussion, guided by willful ignorance. Anyone who claimed they “didn’t know” is clearly delusional or misinformed. Even this article here, uses the technique of Salient Exemplar to mislead the readers. The narrative of the “Oxycontin” which has been repeated so many times, is deliberately deceptive. The Fact remains that our FDA, FTC, and various medical industry lobbying groups, ignored Facts, in order to protect the industries that were profiting. It is also a Fact, that no criminal charges were brought against any of the Illegal Distributors, that fueled this “Epidemic.”
I still don’t want this type of concern about medical health care decisions, to be the topic of the federal government’s decisions. The physicians and their patients have a right to expect privacy between the physicians and the patients only.
Anyone who has ever been identified as drug seeking addicts, are typically exposed by the doctors and the pharmacies in their communities.
Patients who are truly dependent upon their medications, in order to have even a modicum of a quality of life experience, because of their respective injuries, or conditions that require their using opioids that they are the least likely to overdose, nor do the overwhelming majority of patients who cannot have a life worth living, without their opioid medications, abuse their medications. The extremely few people who do, are also not necessarily abusing their medications; some days/nights are so profoundly difficult for any human being to endure, that on rare occasions some people have no choices except to use just a little bit more of their medications, because they are truly in the most horrific pain that any human being could ever know and still survive the few times that the medications are used for those atypical moments when responsible patients do not abuse their medications, however they on rare occasions require a little bit more. Then they also have some times that they could not take a dose of the prescribed medications, using less to make up for the exceptional times that they are in need for a little bit more of their medications.
The patients are not abusing their opioid medications, nor the non opioid medications, they on rare occasions carefully discern whether or not to use their medications wisely. That is a huge difference from an individual who is a truly abuser of medications that most are not required to have in the first place. That issue is rightfully entitled to be determined by the physicians and their patients. This is not a government issue for the individuals who have had their rights taken away from them and their physicians, along with many other patients who require these medications post surgical especially, and those who are in treatment for a specific period of time, as they require opioids, and as they improve, are titrated off the medications with the help of their physicians and many pharmacists too.
The government is not supposed be acting as they are now; they have no right to be insinuating itself in the privacy of the relationship between physicians and their patients.
I absolutely agree. The government has no place deciding a one size fits all treatment plan. They have no place deciding what kind, how much, or when patients need medicine. Forcing millions to suffer is not the answer.