The federal government and private insurers fall short when it comes to detecting, reporting and addressing opioid abuse, says a congressional report released Tuesday.
The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found there is a lack of clear standards governing when insurance companies should report cases of opioid abuse. The panel also found that an integrity contractor for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services investigated only 7 percent of insurers’ abuse complaints in 2015, and its number of investigations has steadily declined since 2008.
Additionally, the report found that private health insurers aren’t doing much to use a multimillion-dollar database created by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to track opioid abuse schemes across insurers.
As opioid abuse intensifies around the country, policy experts and activists have been calling for more safeguards and prevention efforts to counter the problem. The report shows the federal government needs to do more on opioid abuse, said Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who lead the subcommittee.
“The subcommittee’s investigation found that the federal government can, and must, do more to combat opioid fraud and abuse,” the senators said in a joint statement. “Private health insurance companies on the front lines of this crisis also must boost their efforts to use every available tool and piece of data to identify and care for beneficiaries in need of help.”
