WASHINGTON – In case you missed it, Senator Maggie Hassan, Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care, recently launched an investigation into whether patients at for-profit methadone clinics encounter unnecessary barriers when seeking lifesaving methadone treatment for opioid addiction. The investigation is a part of Senator Hassan’s longstanding efforts to expand access to medication-assisted treatment, including methadone, for opioid use disorder.
Read coverage highlights of Senator Hassan’s investigation below:
Stat News: Sen. Hassan launches probe of for-profit methadone clinics
By Lev Facher
A top Democratic senator is launching an investigation into privately owned methadone clinics’ business practices and treatment of patients.
In letters to three separate for-profit methadone clinic chains, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) is demanding information about revenue, patient volumes, and employee numbers from three major methadone clinic chains: BayMark, New Season, and Acadia.
The investigation, Hassan wrote, seeks to “better understand the impact of the OTP model on patient access to methadone; patient treatment outcomes; and potential waste, fraud, and abuse in federal health care programs.”
The effort comes amid increasing scrutiny of methadone clinics in Washington and across the nation. Amid the opioid overdose crisis, the methadone clinics have come under fire for restrictive policies that the clinics cast as safety measures but that patient advocates argue can discourage people from seeking methadone treatment in the first place.
Hassan’s letters also repeatedly cite “The War on Recovery,” a STAT investigation of broad U.S. hostility to effective medications used to treat opioid addiction, including methadone. In particular, the letters cite STAT’s reporting on methadone clinics’ treatment of patients and the recent influx of private equity ownership that industry insiders, academics, and patients argue have incentivized the companies to value profits over patient outcomes.
Methadone is the most effective drug currently approved to treat opioid use disorder, and can be highly effective as a chemical substitute for dangerous illicit substances like heroin or fentanyl. The medication is an opioid itself, allowing it to bind to the same brain receptors as the more dangerous illicit medications — but when misused, can lead to impairment or even overdose.
As an addiction treatment, methadone is only available at roughly 2,000 specialized clinics nationwide that often impose stringent requirements for patients, like mandated counseling sessions, urine drug tests supervised at close quarters by cameras or staff, and, in many cases, the requirement that patients attend the clinic almost daily to receive their dose.
Notably, Hassan, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee’s health panel, requested information about exactly how many patients are receiving take-home medication and how frequently they’re required to come into the clinic.
A 2024 rewrite of the federal regulations governing methadone clinics loosened restrictions at the federal level, but it remains unclear whether state regulatory bodies have followed suit — and perhaps more critically, whether individual clinics have used the new flexibilities to make care less onerous for patients.
A 2024 STAT investigation showed nearly one-third of all methadone clinics nationwide are owned by private equity firms, and that in many states, clinics are highly incentivized to require frequent in-person clinic attendance instead of awarding “take-homes.”
Hassan’s effort, for now, is specific to the three chains operating the 10 methadone clinics open to the public in New Hampshire. But the three companies, collectively, own roughly 18% of the nation’s methadone clinics, according to STAT’s analysis. Acadia has also come under scrutiny in the past year following a New York Times report that alleged the clinic had billing fraud, in large part by charging insurance providers for counseling sessions that never took place.
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WVNY: Hassan investigates barriers to treatment for opioid abuse
By Ben Breen
New Hampshire Sen. Maggie Hassan announced Wednesday that she was looking into difficulties that keep people addicted to opioids from accessing needed treatment.
She wrote that only a quarter of Americans with opioid addiction receive treatment with medications including methadone.
She added that distance to an opioid treatment program, or OTP, has a major effect on how willing patients are to return. “In rural states like New Hampshire, the distance between patients and the nearest OTP can require a two-hour drive.”
“For-profit OTP owners argue that [the current] system helps patients by promoting individualized therapy and counseling,” continued Hassan. “Yet some of these same companies have allegedly defrauded the government and neglected their patients by billing Medicare and Medicaid for inadequate or even non-existent therapy or counseling.”
In a letter sent to CEOs of for-profit treatment programs, Hassan called for them to share data including revenue and patient outcomes.
440 people died of drug overdoses in New Hampshire in 2023, along with 259 in Vermont and 6,330 in New York. All three states have rates much lower than West Virginia, which has the highest rate in the nation, but deaths are much higher than before 2020.
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