Since my last post, we’ve had an end to the Governor’s Opiate Emergency Task Force, and an end to the legislative session. One of those events was fairly satisfactory, the other was so very very not.

Good news first. The task force got together a whole bunch of people-physicians, insurance industry types (I sat on both of those focus groups, wearing different hats), opiate users, family members of opiate users, folks from the treating community (often, but not always also physicians). Everyone had their say regarding how things should move forward, and we produced a not-bad compromise document (where “we” means “the consulting firm hired by the state, with ‘help’ from the committee). Largely it called for better information about access and more study of the issue to understand 1) What the best treatment practices were, 2) where the actual (as opposed to “perceived”) barriers to treatment access were, and a bit too little of 3) how can we best prevent the problem, rather than treating it? The time for action is when you understand the problem, not when you understand the question(s); right now all we have are questions.

I was pretty happy about the task force report, even if the rollout was, shall we say, marred by some gratuitous verbiage from the governor regarding how insurance companies are trying to get out of treating people by sending them to Medicaid. I can personally guarantee that at least one company-mine-absolutely does not do this, and I doubt anyone else does either. It’s just not how we think; members are members; at other companies they’re customers. You don’t tell people like that to go away; you try to help them. (Note: Most people in the health insurance industry, once upon a time, were health care providers of some sort. None of us go into that field for the money, or the fame and fortune). But I was willing to overlook that (and got to say a few words to Martha Bebinger from NPR on the subject, which was nice), because I still believed we’d done something useful-not complete, not finished, but the problem has been with us long and long; we’re not going to fix it anytime soon. It was a start.

The legislature, which had been making “We got this, and we’re going to by God *do* something about it” noises since the governor made his announcement, decided around now (actually shortly before) to come out with their proposals. And: They sucked. Lo, like unto a vacuum cleaner did they suck. In effect, they said “It’s all the insurance industry’s fault. We, The Legislature, will by God make them do The Right Thing.”

Next post: The Wrong Thing.