The New York Times reports that Acadia Healthcare, which provides methadone to addicts at 165 for-profit methadone clinics across the country, including Anchorage, has a business model built on deception.
Acadia is a for-profit company that is built on volume and that earned $1.3 billion in revenue since 2022, providing methadone, counseling, drug testing, and other services.
“But Acadia often fails to provide that counseling, according to five dozen current and former employees in 22 of the 33 states where the company has clinics. Instead, employees at times falsify the medical records that Acadia uses to bill insurers, according to the employees and internal emails,” the New York Times reported.
“Sometimes a counseling session recorded in a patient’s medical chart is simply a chance encounter. For example, medical records for a patient in Iowa show she had a 40-minute counseling session in December 2023, but the patient said in an interview that it was actually a hallway chat that lasted less than five minutes,” the newspaper reported. “Its counselors carry caseloads that are sometimes more than double the limit set by state regulators, according to employees and inspection records.”
The directors of the clinics can get bonuses based on the number of patients they enroll, which may have encouraged directors to treat people who are not actually addicted to opioids, but are addicted to other drugs that are typically not treated by methadone. In these instances, clients may be using the methadone to get high.
“With so many patients, the clinics can become assembly lines, offering little more than a cup of methadone,” the newspaper reports.