So, the other night I posted about cash-only buprenorphine practices. The next morning I find this in my mail. Consulting services to help establish turn-key buprenorphine clinics with cash revenue models that use toxicology services to generate revenue and provide aggressive risk management. (It’s worth noting that I also get emails about treatment valuation conferences/services … Continue reading The treatment hustle behind the scenes

This weekend, John Oliver spent nearly 2o minutes describing several of the treatment industry’s biggest hustles. Is this a sign of the times? Maybe, but it’s not new. In Recovery Rising, Bill White describes the business landscape in the 1980s: The trend of private insurance companies paying for the treatment of alcoholism and subsequently other … Continue reading The treatment hustle makes Last Week Tonight

New York state is warning people seeking treatment to beware of treatment fraud. More here.

A new story suggests that Dr. Phil may be in on the hustle: A STAT/Boston Globe investigation shows how some carefully placed promotions are also a financial opportunity for a new business venture involving the show’s host, Phillip McGraw, and his son, Jay. An addiction recovery program the McGraws launched this year comes with an … Continue reading Another treatment hustle?

What if some big restaurant group (that owns a bunch of chains) surreptitiously bought Yelp and used Yelp to steer diners to their restaurant? That would be a shady hustle, right? Well, it happens all the time in the world of addiction treatment: As the opioid epidemic continues to spiral, more and more people have reason … Continue reading Another treatment hustle

It’s the kind of thing that 99.9% of people would never know, but addiction treatment related keywords have long been the most expensive keywords in Google AdWords. By far. There are treatment programs with, say, 80 beds that have 100 websites. Some identify the provider, most do not. A few years back I published a … Continue reading Another hustle. Google steps in. (Thank you, Google.)

HuffPo has a new article on ethically impaired treatment providers: The opioid epidemic, which just added Prince to its list of victims, has shoved the addiction industry into the spotlight, and many here at the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers conference worried aloud how the industry’s lax ethical standards would look in the new … Continue reading Another day, another recovery hustle

Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Weekly (ADAW) posted an article that describes the system used by a Florida treatment program to fill beds with insured clients as an out-of-network provider. They want out-of-network admissions because they do not come with managed care restrictions. ADAW describes their approach as “not unusual for the field.” The fact that … Continue reading Another hustle. “This is predatory.”

There’s more attention on addiction, treatment and recovery than there has ever been. It’s a good thing that brings some bad things. One of the bad things is the emergence of recovery hustlers. Some are exploiting it as an opportunity for profit and others are exploiting it as an opportunity for attention. NPR just ran … Continue reading Recovery hustlers

Working in the substance use service system has always been a challenge. This was true even from its early days. We help people in some of their most difficult moments with few resources to support what they need to get well. We operate under constant triage conditions. Yet despite this, we tend to oversell those … Continue reading The Few, The Proud, The Under Resourced – Our SUD Workforce