A MAT Act Action Plan to Eliminate the Special Drug Enforcement Agency Waiver for Prescription Drugs for Opioid Use Disorder
The MAT Act would eliminate the special Drug Enforcement Administration waiver that doctors must apply for in order to prescribe buprenorphine (a medication that helps reduce the craving for opioids). Community health aides would be able to prescribe this medication if the doctor sends it through e-mail. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration would be responsible to start a national campaign to inform health care professionals about the dangers of using drugs foropioid use disorder. The data show that these drugs offer some of the best options for helping people recover from opiate use and prevent overdoses. According to a report in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, less than 20% of people who could benefit had access to them.
There are several reasons for that, including stigma and a lack of understanding about how medications for opioid use disorder work. The biggest problem is that so few doctors are willing to treat addiction in the first place. Lawmakers will need to find ways to ensure that addiction treatment is the same reimbursement rate for other chronic conditions, if they are going to drop the D.E.A. waiver. But eliminating the waiver would still be a crucial step in the right direction. The prescription drugs that caused the current epidemic should not be easier to access than the medications that could help alleviate it.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/opinion/drug-crisis-addiction.html
Are there side effects of addiction? A case study of the U.S. Universal Health Care System based on Tonko’s MAT Act
The MAT Act, which was written by Representative Paul Tonko of New York, boasts some 248 co-sponsors and has already passed the House as part of a broader mental health package.
Doctors with views about addiction don’t provide treatment for patients with it. Many doctors say they lack the confidence to treat addiction because they don’t have enough training or access to specialists who can help guide them. Drug users can also resist treatment. Some think of medications for addiction as merely replacing one drug with another, though experts reject that framing because the medications replace drugs that do harm with drugs that can help.
Some of the problems are specific to addiction. Others are larger than that. Obesity and mental health conditions are often undertreated, too. The flu season is not as good as it would be if more people got their annual shots. While Americans’ overuse of health care frequently receives attention, underuse is a problem in many situations as well.
Often, people, including doctors, have outsize fears about the downsides of some treatments, especially new ones. With Covid, doctors worry about Paxlovid’s interactions with other drugs — a real problem but largely a manageable one. When using a medication like buprenorphine, patients mistakenly think it’s another drug, even though it can save their lives.
The American health care system’s fragmented nature also makes it easier for problems to fall through the cracks. In France, officials can leverage the country’s universal health care system to overcome hesitancy to new treatments by guaranteeing they’re widely available and by strongly pushing for their use. In the U.S. system, there is no centralized authority, so medical authorities struggle to coordinate care even when the best practices seem clear.
Drug overdoses are a major public health problem in the United States, they are one reason life expectancy fell in 2020 and 2021. The U.S. spends far more per person on health care than any other country and also has lower life expectancy than Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia and much of Western Europe.