Auditing the admission practices for opioid use disorder treatment

<p>The opioid epidemic has ravaged American life.</p><p>It has <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/index.html">claimed more than 750,000 lives</a> as a result of a drug overdose since 1999. In 2018 alone, more than <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html">2 million people had an opioid use disorder</a> and more than 800,000 people used heroin.</p><p>To alleviate these deaths of despair and get people the treatment they need, many individuals are looking to short-term residential facilities for substance use treatment programs, commonly referred to as rehabilitation, or rehab.</p><p>But, as a paper in the 2021 February issue of <em>Health Affairs </em>notes, <a href="https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00378">recruitment practices and cost of care at these facilities can raise concerns</a>. The authors found most programs required up-front payments, with for-profit programs charging more than twice as much as nonprofits.</p><p>Listen to Alan Weil interview Tamara Beetham, a PhD student in health policy and management at the <a href="https://medicine.yale.edu/">Yale School of Medicine</a> and lead author of the paper. </p><p>Subscribe: <a href="https://feeds.transistor.fm/a-health-podyssey">RSS</a> | <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-health-podyssey/id1533852530">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy50cmFuc2lzdG9yLmZtL2EtaGVhbHRoLXBvZHlzc2V5">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/3tAEbXdlzlcgjLTHfJMYqR">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://castro.fm/itunes/1533852530">Castro</a> | <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=576615&amp;refid=stpr">Stitcher</a></p>