The Cost of Addiction Treatment

Most people don’t like to talk about money, especially when it comes to the cost of receiving healthcare and mental health counseling or addiction treatment. The helping profession is often seen as a charitable labor of love. People who enter the helping professions don’t usually get in the field because they want to get rich, but they still have to make a living. I suppose some young people become doctors partly because the pay is high at that level but most helping professionals don’t make a lot of money compared to business type careers or jobs that require specialized knowledge in some area of technology. Yet what these helping professionals provide is very valuable.

It takes money to provide these services. Related to outpatient addiction treatment, many facilities receive state or federal funding so they can reduce the cost to clients, but private addiction facilities have to charge insurance companies, if the person has insurance. If the person doesn’t have insurance and doesn’t want to go into a government funded facility, then they pay cash. Often, even if a person has insurance there are co-pays and deductibles, so the person has to pay the balance. It’s the paying cash that’s often an obstacle.

At NewDay we work with each client who chooses to pay partial cash or all cash. Our office director will come up with a payment plan after a partial down payment that fits into the client’s budget. Even then some people balk at the amount and state it’s too high. We discount the full price if someone has to pay cash for treatment, so it comes out between 5000 and 6000 dollars for 8 weeks of treatment, 3 hours an evening 4 evenings a week, with one individual session and upfront medical visit. There are no hidden costs, it’s an all-inclusive price.

Six thousand dollars seems like a lot of money, but in perspective it’s not. Often, clients come to us with job problems, legal problems, and an addiction that’s costing them up to hundreds of dollars a week. If a client’s serious about treatment, and if they develop and maintain a strong recovery, they usually hold down a job, they avoid legal costs and they don’t spend money on alcohol, cocaine, pot, opiates or other drugs and all the wasted money that accompanies being high with impaired judgement. Our payment of 200 or so dollars a money begins to pale in comparison, and one day the payment will go away, while in active addiction there’s no end to the wasted money and it gets worse as time goes on.

In reality, if a person remains sober and straight, $6000 for the cost of treatment is a great investment that generates returns the rest of a person’s life. I’ve witnessed thousands of recoveries in which people went on to succeed financially, and in every other way, way beyond their wildest dreams. It’s all what a person makes it.