Wolf Administration pushes for more funding to combat heroin and opioid epidemic

Wolf Administration pushes for more funding to combat heroin and opioid epidemic.

Human Services Secretary Ted Dallas discusses new effort to combat opiod epidemicSaying it's time to try a new approach to try to combat opiod addiction, Dallas discusses rationale behind Gov. Tom Wolf's proposal to spend $34 million to implement 50 centers to provide more coordinated care that will look not just at addressing...  Some $630 million a year in Medicaid funding goes toward combating the heroin and opioid epidemic in Pennsylvania but the results don't show it making much of a difference, said Human Services Secretary Ted Dallas.
 Four out of every five Medicaid recipients with substance abuse addictions are not in treatment even after they overdose, he said. So Gov. Tom Wolf's administration believes it's time to try something different. 
 That's what the proposed Centers of Excellence, as the administration is calling them, are about. They are places that will provide a more comprehensive, team-based form of treatment for addicts. 
 Wolf wants to establish 50 of these centers across the state over the next year to treat more than 11,000 people with addictions. 
 Wolf's budget is proposing more than $34.2 million to fund the centers or "health homes" as they are sometimes called, which will be supplemented with $16 million in federal dollars.
 "Rather than just treating the addiction, we're treating the entire person," Dallas said at a Wednesday briefing with reporters. "That gives people the best chance they have to beat their addiction."
 He explained too often the treatment that a person with a substance abuse disorder receives is strictly for their drug addiction.

"But most of the time someone has a co-occuring behaviorial health issue or a physical manifestations of that behavioral health issue or they have physical pain issue that led them to start abusing opioids in the first place," Dallas said. "If we don't treat those underlying causes and those reasons, we think you can only be so successful." 
 The Department of Human Services solicited applications from providers interested in becoming one of the 50 Centers of Excellence to provide that level of treatment. It received 116 applications by the deadline, department spokeswoman Rachel Kostelac said.
 A House hearing on privately funded recovery houses held in April shone the light on issues that have arisen at some of these facilities including overcrowding, problems with neighbors and being a magnet for drug dealers. However, Dallas said what his department is proposing is different. The centers are unlikely to be residential facilities but rather ones that provide care on an outpatient basis, he said.

 Dallas pointed out that this treatment approach has been tried in other places and proven successful. One example the department pointed to is CleanSlate in Massachusetts. CleanSlate, as Kostelac described it, is a doctor-led office practice, providing medication-assisted treatment for a variety of addictions.

This Wolf Administration initiative builds on the 20 Centers of Excellence for pregnant women with substance abuse disorders that were funded in this year's budget and are in the process of being established. Dallas said the centers are all part of the administration's broader effort that involves the state Departments of Health and Drug and Alcohol to combat this epidemic that the state, like the nation, faces. 

 source: pennlive