New CDC Report on Opiods

Today's guest post is by The Hon. David Langham who is the Deputy Chief Judge of Compensation Claims for the Florida Office of Judges of Compensation Claims and Division of Administrative Hearings flojcc.blogspot.com

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently issued a report on opiod painkillers. It concludes that prescriptions for opiods remain more common in the United States than anywhere else in the world. In 2012 there were 259 million prescriptions written for painkillers in this country. The report concludes this is "enough for every American adult to have a bottle of pills." (In the interest of full disclosure, I did not get mine, so someone must have gotten my share).

Drug overdose and interaction remains a problem in this country. According to the CDC "deaths from drug overdose have been rising steadily over the past two decades." Each day, "113 people die as a result of drug overdose and another 6,748 are treated in emergency departments for the misuse or abuse of drugs." The CDC says that 9 of 10 "poisoning deaths are caused by drugs."

The report quantifies the number of prescriptions per 100 people in each state (in parenthesis that follow). The five states with the most opiod prescriptions were Alabama (143), Kentucky (128), Oklahoma (128), Tennessee (143), and West Virginia (138). These are labelled as the "highest" states in the study. The five states labelled the "lowest" volume were California (57), Hawaii (52), Minnesota (62), New Jersey (63) and New York (60).

Florida is in the large group of 21 states categorized as "below average" in the study, with 73 prescriptions per 100...

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Sidetracked By Drugs

New York Mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The core health care delivery problems that exist in workers' compensation are not being driven by the alleged excess prescriptions of pain relief medication. That is a symptom of a system that has been derailed.

The focus of major employer and insurance initiatives of so-called reform legislation in multiple jurisdictions has been to reduce the delivery of prescriptive pain relief. Actually, that is an enforcement issue only that globally exists in the health care industry. New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is working diligently to identify and database the few prescribers and physicians involved.  A national effort modeled after the New York process would go a long way to curtain excessive and unorthodox prescriptions.

To use the prescription drug abuse issue to attack workers' compensation generally is merely sidetracking the real problem with the medical delivery system which is the global denial of compensability of workers' compensation claims by employers and insurance carriers merely to delay and avoid payment of medical benefits.

The recent decision in Federal Court recognizing RICO violations by an insurance carrier, the employer medical expert, and the employer itself, puts the real focus on the problem.  That decision demonstrates the need to get the workers' compensation train back on the tracks and redirect the system so that it pays benefits to injured workers in an efficient and timely basis.

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