Access to Addiction Treatment

Through the years, since I started working in the addiction treatment field in 1983, I’ve heard from various “expert” sources, and have read in various articles, that treatment doesn’t work. I’m not sure there are any good studies that can tell us definitively if treatment works or not, but some studies show that addiction treatment, comprehensive, quality treatment, works as well as treatment for other diseases we consider relatively successful.

The real question is, though, are enough people getting access to addiction treatment to know if treatment can drastically change the outcomes of addiction? I don’t think so. This statistic is from DrugFree.org :

­Twenty-three million Americans are currently addicted to alcohol and/or other drugs.  Only one in 10 of them (2.6 million) receives the treatment they need. The result: a treatment gap of more than 20 million Americans.

The main reason people don’t get access to addiction treatment, and, thus, there’s a lack of quality treatment, is because they can’t afford addiction treatment and most insurance carriers don’t cover or don’t make it easy to access such treatment. Because it’s very difficult to access treatment, quality treatment centers are hard to find. It’s a Catch 22. If more people had insurance, and if insurance covered addiction treatment as it does treatment of other diseases, there would be more quality treatment facilities and better success from addiction treatment. Just think if only one out of ten people who have cancer accessed treatment — the results would be tragic. However, we don’t often hear the tragic results of untreated addiction, or, more to the point, the tragic results arent identified clearly as untreated addiction.

This is also from DrugFree.org:

In contrast to other chronic diseases, funding for addiction treatment disproportionately comes from government sources.  More than three-quarters – 77 percent – of treatment costs are paid by federal, state and local governments, including Medicaid and Medicare.  Private insurance covers only 10 percent of addiction treatment costs, with out-of- pocket expenditures and other private funding making up the remaining percentage.  In contrast, private insurance pays for approximately 37 percent of general medical costs.

Untreated addiction costs society billion and billions each year. Until we find a way for private insurance to cover addiction as it does other medical concerns, society will continue to pay the high social costs of untreated or mistreated addiction.