NATIONAL RECOVERY MONTH 

This is National Recovery Month, a time to remember that addiction and mental health treatment can restore patients to a healthy and rewarding life.  Patients can and do recover.  

Accessible and high quality services also lead to a healthier population.  For every dollar spent on addiction treatment, our community will save $12 in reduced costs associated with crime, emergency room visits, hospitalization and other health care.    
 

The pain and trauma to the families of those with the illness is unmeasurable.  Making treatment services more available to those in need has been a struggle.  We have most all levels of care represented but accessibility is not always so simple.  As funding for those who cannot afford treatment continues to decrease, so do services.  There have been some changes since health care reform.  More and more programs are accepting public health insurance such as Maryland Primary Adult Care (PAC) and Maryland Medicaid (MA) where the MCOs cover this service.  The downside is PAC does not pay for residential and MA allows only very short term residential stays.  Private insurance does not do much better. They do not consider addictive illness the severe medical illness that it is.     

The greatest gap in accessible care is for pain pill addiction.  This has become a major issue in our area.  The most effective treatment is hard to find and hard to afford.  There is little to no state or county funding focused on this specific addiction. The treatment is a medication called Suboxone.  There are few doctors willing to get the license to prescribe this medicine.  For example, there are five doctors prescribing Suboxone in Calvert County, one in Charles and one in St. Mary's.   Most are not taking any new patients as regulations do not allow  them to see more than 100.  

Although people do not choose to become addicts, they can choose how to manage their disease, if they can access treatment. Treatment works!  There are millions in recovery and thousands in our area.    You will find them in every town, every church, every sporting event, every family, everywhere.  They tend not to advertise they are in recovery. Their recovery is a gift of a new life.