Here's one of the consequences of the new health reform law you might have missed: The number of people seeking treatment for addiction could double, depending upon how many states expand Medicaid programs and how many addicts take advantage of them.
And for many of them, there will be no place to go. "In more than two thirds of the states, treatment clinics are already at or approaching 100 percent capacity," writes Carla K. Johnson (photo) of The Associated Press. That comes from a piece in which Johnson compared federal government data on addiction rates in the 50 states, the capacity of existing treatment programs, and the provisions of the new healthcare law.
The surge of new patients is "expected to push a marginal part of the health care system out of church basements and into the mainstream of medical care," she writes, in a nice image that suggests the ad-hoc nature of a lot of treatment programs, which are often forced to find a home wherever they can, outside of hospitals or clinics.
Delivering care under the Affordable Care Act might be difficult for many kinds of patients, but addiction treatment "may represent an extreme example" of the act's challenges, Johnson writes.
Johnson's story is a reminder that while the health reform law made great strides toward expanding healthcare coverage, the implementation on the ground after its passage could be even messier than the political brawls that preceded it.
-Paul Raeburn
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