Collaboration To Change Treatment For Opiate Addiction

As I’ve worked to build and evolve my podcast, I have really enjoyed bringing information that will help healthcare buyers understand their options, legislation and market trends in a new way. As I’ve worked on content, this internal question has formed. What if I can bring content that will help the greater good? This episode with Premera Blue Cross and Boulder Care is one of those. My returning guest, Rick Abbott, works with a passion to do something good for humanity which inspires me every time we talk. 

Today is an episode that should strike a nerve. The statistics about opiate addiction and death by overdose are absolutely terrible and yet we haven’t yet demanded or come up with any solution better than lien your home, drain your 401(k), admit your loved one to a facility that will likely not contract with insurance, won’t charge based on outcomes and will likely see your loved one for treatment more than once. Don’t get me wrong, there are many cracks and flaws in treatment addiction but if you’ve ever been the person who is doing everything in your power to help a person with addiction, you know how hopeless it feels. Unless money is no object.

I see the effects of addiction in my community. I have hugged and prayed with other mothers who are so fearful about what addiction is doing to their kids. I’ve hugged a mom who buried her son, my son’s friend, and wondered how mine dodged the epidemic that is wreaking destruction on his generation. I’ve watched two very different groups of conversation on social media and I get it. There is the anger group. Angry about what addiction has done to families and communities. The increase of crime, camping and garbage and they want more law enforcement. I know for some in the anger group, it is born from grief. Some of them gave everything they had to save someone who wasn’t to be saved. The other group is the legalize group. They want to decriminalize all together and provide medical support for safe injections. They want for a person to have as many options and ways to live as they can.  I can’t pretend to know the right answers. I just know what we have been doing isn’t working. I know a solution will have to include all of us: insurance carriers, healthcare providers, employers and regular people like us to demand change and not be afraid to talk about addiction so others will feel safe to ask for help – whether it’s the person with addiction asking or someone who loves them who just can’t do this alone. 

I hope my episodes with Stephanie Papes of Boulder Care and Rick will give you a fresh hope for treatment and care. I hope it inspires you to talk differently about addiction and treatment. It sure did for me. I love some people who have worked through addiction treatment and I didn’t realize how I was contributing to a stigma by using words like “clean” and “addict”. I want to do better. Boulder Care is a solution that gives me hope and knowing that Premera is willing to take risks and collaborate as a payor is a hope that other payors will follow suit. Lastly, I hope that you will have new hope after watching and listening.