Toomey-backed bill on opioid crisis headed to passage
The Senate was expected to pass late Monday the Opioid Crisis Response Act, a collection of 70 points rolled into one bill meant to fight the opioid epidemic.
During a conference call Monday afternoon, Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who helped write some of the provisions, said the bill will offer $4.7 billion over the next few years to fund programs, which will need to be authorized, to help battle the epidemic.
“I think this is an important step forward,” he said.
The bill covers everything from treatment options and recovery housing to first responder training, youth prevention and a crackdown on prescription pain medication.
“We use opiates to really disguise the brain’s interpretation of pain,” Toomey said.
This bill will offer “more effective ways” of dealing with the cause of pain, he said.
One measure in the bill, to which the University of Pittsburgh contributed research, is the monitoring of victims of nonfatal overdoses who use Medicare.
“The federal government is the world’s largest purchaser of opioids through the Medicare and Medicaid programs,” Toomey said. “As such it has a unique responsibility. Medicare and Medicaid have not been doing as much as they could and should.”
Toomey said the legislation would allow for Medicare to use an “over-utilization system,” which would identify people who survived an overdose and share that information with prescription drug plans, doctors and patients. The purpose would be to prevent those individuals from overdosing again.
Medicare has not been monitoring these people as well as they could be, Toomey said.
“I think that’s a clear shortfall that we will correct in this legislation,” he said.
Though the bill won’t “preclude” those individuals from being prescribed more opioids following an overdose, it would allow any prescribers or doctors to be aware that the patient recently overdosed.
The bill also will add mandates to electronic prescribing along with an “online portal where prescribers will be able to monitor” and report suspected overuse of opioids, Toomey said. The bill also includes monitoring of prescribers that issue more prescriptions than their peers, he said.
“We’re going to require that we monitor and determine when there are physicians that are outliers in terms of the opioids that they prescribe,” Toomey said.