Insurance and the Opioid Crisis

From data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2016:

•  In 2016 health care providers across the U.S. wrote more than 214 million prescriptions for opioid pain medication – a rate of 66.5 prescriptions per 100 people.
• As many as 1 in 5 people (20%) receive prescription opioids long-term for noncancerous pain in primary care settings.
• More than 11 million people abused prescription opioids in 2016.
• Every day, more than 1,000 people are treated in emergency departments for misusing prescription opioids.
• More than 40% of all U.S opioid overdose deaths in 2016 involved a prescription opioid.
• Drug overdoses claimed the lives of nearly 64,000 Americans in 2016. Nearly two-thirds of these deaths (66%) involved a prescription or illicit opioid. (the number of total deaths in 2108 is over 70,000).

When employment practices liability insurance came to market, a fair question asked of the insurance industry was whether it was moral for an insurance company to provide insurance to cover the costs of litigation should the insured company be found negligent in a claim for sexual harassment? By paying for the costs of litigation and fines wasn’t the insurance company providing a product that would encourage rather than discourage wrongful behavior?

I can see the logic of that argument in the opioid crisis. If a physician did not have liability insurance that would cover opioid use/abuse would that physician be prescribing opioids to the patient? In other words, how does the presence or absence of liability coverage effect the delivery of opioids to patients?

And another question is: do pharmaceutical companies bear liability for how they market opioids and their role in the opioid issue? And then by extension, does the liability insurer of the pharma company providing financial coverage to the manufacturer bear any responsibility?

These are fair questions to ask and this isn’t a hypothetical exercise. One possible approach is for all insurance industry players to share data that will help identify behaviors and patterns that would otherwise be invisible when looked at in small data sets.

This crisis requires the efforts of the industry uniting as a whole, alongside providers and pharma, in order to identify where to rapidly apply intervention before problems, both individual and collective, further entrench themselves.

What do you think?

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John Sarich is an industry analyst and vice president of strategy at VUE Software.