Latest reports showcase that patients may be taking advantage of what Medicare has to offer in order to gain access to opioids and the government could be doing more to stop this.

In 2016, one patient was able to get access to an inordinate amount of opioids from 46 different prescribers and 20 pharmacies, and managed to receive 11 different prescriptions from eight prescribers and 6 pharmacies across 5 different states.

The most alarming component of this is the indication that no medical professional involved checked the patient's prescription history.

Obviously, this is an extreme case, but notes a specific trend cited ina new report from the US Department of Health and Human Services is essentially funding a huge number of opioid prescriptions through the Medicare drug program. It is likely enabling tens of thousands of opioid users to get the drugs for misuse, overuse or reselling.

The report produced several key findings for Medicare Part D beneficiaries and their opioid use in 2016:

About one in three beneficiaries, or 14.4 million people, received at least one opioid prescription.
More than 11 percent of beneficiaries, or 5 million people, received opioids for three months or more.
The research shows the risk of dependence which goes along with addiction.
Almost 90,000 beneficiaries are at “serious risk of opioid misuse or overdose”: Nearly 70,000 appeared to be getting “an extreme amount of opioids,” or 240 mg MED or more a day over 12 months. And more than 22,000 appeared to be doctor shopping, when patients go to various doctors and various pharmacies to try to obtain as many opioids as possible.
And nearly 116,000 ordered opioids for at least one beneficiary at serious risk.

This new report focuses in large part the role of Medicare in this crisis and what they could be doing monitoring both patients and doctors for excessive prescribing practices. Specifically, Medicare could initiate prescription drug monitoring programs to establish a large database that prescribers can use to track patients who have access to a frightening amount of opioids.

Each state except Missouri do have a drug monitoring program in place but some states enforce more and employ comprehensive versions of this program.

One big caveat to the report: Not all the beneficiaries and prescribers that it calls out were necessarily doing something wrong. It is entirely possible that many of these patients and doctors — even those getting or ordering an extreme amount of drugs — have a legitimate medical reason for doing so. The OIG is merely warning that there are so many of these cases that chances are there’s still a lot of unscrupulous prescribing going on.

The report’s findings come at a crucial time in the crisis. It’s currently estimated that up to 65,000 people died of drug overdoses in the US last year alone. This is now the deadliest drug overdose crisis in US history. For an important federal health program to be potentially contributing to the crisis is very bad.