Obama Rejects Limits on Opioid Prescribing
http://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2016/2/22/obama-rejects-limits-on-opioid-prescribing
By Pat Anson, Editor
President Barack Obama declined to endorse a sweeping proposal by some governors to put limits on the number of opioid painkillers that doctors can prescribe, saying such a policy would be unfair to rural Americans who don’t have access to other pain treatments.
“If we go to doctors right now and say ‘Don’t over prescribe’ without providing some mechanisms for people in these communities to deal with the pain that they have or the issues that they have, then we’re not going to solve the problem,” Obama said.
Over the weekend, a committee of the National Governors Association voted to develop treatment guidelines that would seek to put limits on opioid prescribing nationwide. The proposed guidelines could be voted on by the governors at their next meeting in August.
Although no specific number was put on the number of opioid doses that could be prescribed at one time, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) said it should be no more than 10 pills for treatment of acute pain. Shumlin has complained in the past that opioids “are passed out like candy in America.”
Shumlin’s proposal was quickly endorsed by Republican Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky, a sign that the guidelines would have bipartisan support among the nation’s governors.
President Obama met with the governors Monday at the White House and endorsed their bipartisan approach to addressing the so-called opioid epidemic.
“This is an area where I can get agreement from Bernie Sanders and Mitch McConnell. That doesn’t happen that often,” Obama said.
The president of the American Medical Association said Obama was right to question the potential consequences of putting additional restrictions on doctors and patients.
“The complexity of the problem makes it difficult to create a successful one-size-fits-all approach,” Dr. Steven Stack said in a statement to the Associated Press.
WHITE HOUSE PHOTO
The proposed guidelines could also include policies similar to those adopted by insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, which requires prior authorization for opioid prescriptions. Some patients are also required to use a single pharmacy for their opioid prescriptions. The policies have resulted in a 50 percent reduction in claims for long acting opioids such as OxyContin, and a 25 percent reduction in claims for short-acting opioids, according to Blue Cross Blue Shield.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), heroin and opioid overdoses are killing as many as 78 American a day, although the agency admits its numbers may not be accurate.
Vermont’s Shumlin has emerged as one of the nation’s most vocal critics of opioid prescribing practices. His state and others in the Northeast have been have been hit hard by opioid and heroin overdoses.
“As long as opioid medications remain the default mainstay therapies for chronic pain, these drugs will constitute an ever-present risk for diversion and addiction. We need to address the prescription opioid crisis at its source: opioid medications, as we know them, must be made obsolete,” Shumlin wrote in a recent letter to U.S. senators who are drafting legislation to reform the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Shumlin urged the senators to provide additional funding to NIH for clinical research into affordable and non-addictive alternatives to opioids.
Filed under: General Problems
This is the second time I’ve read about someone wanting to make opioids obsolete. The other article talked about how all opioids should be taken off the market. It’s like these people don’t understand how long we’ve been using opioids, why they work, and what would happen if they disappeared.
Hello, you ignorant politicians? Don’t ya’ll understand that the heroin “epidemic” was created by restricting opioids?
Nor do ya’ll understand how under-treated acute pain develops into chronic and intractable pain. Can you try to comprehend how much more difficult it is to treat chronic rather than acute pain? And how stupid you sound when you say only 10 pain pills for everyone suffering from acute pain, no matter what?
Thank goodness for cannabis. Seriously, without this option, I’d probably be dead right now. But cannabis doesn’t work for everyone, so I don’t know what other pain patients are going to do.
It’s getting crazy up in here…
“Shumlin urged the senators to provide additional funding to NIH for clinical research into affordable and non-addictive alternatives to opioids.”
That’s easy.
Cannabis.
You have all these governors trying to limit the amount prescribed, then you have a mayor in new York state who wants the give real junkies a government location to inject their heroin. Humm, where are our priorities? Yes a safe injection site for heroin addicts might give a push to helping them but pushing more people to use heroin by limiting opioid amounts to pain patients would just defeat the purpose.