Recently, a small group of United States senators proposed a bill that would tax prescription opioid medications and use the revenue to finance addiction and substance abuse treatments. There are those in workers’ compensation who are worried about legislation like that, saying that it would greatly increase their costs since opioid utilization is so high in work comp.

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia led the charge on this bill, called the Budgeting for Opioid Addiction Treatment Act, or LifeBOAT. The bill proposes a 1 cent tax on every milligram of active opioid in a pill, so a 10 mg pill would have a $.10 tax. As the dosage increases that tax obviously goes up, so a patient taking 100mg would be generating a tax of a dollar a day. The bill has a rebate program for cancer or hospice related pharmaceuticals and will not tax drugs that are used to treat opioid addiction.

Workers’ comp payers handle everything related to a claim and do not set co-pays or anything that would be passed onto the payer that might offset this extra cost, and a tax like this may have a big impact on their pharmacy spend. The authors of the bill estimate that the tax will generate $1.5-$2 million a year. Last year’s Express Scripts Workers’ Comp Drug Trend Report estimated that opioids counted for a quarter of drug utilization in workers’ comp, 25.7percent.

“A major barrier that those suffering from opioid addiction face is insufficient access to substance abuse treatment,” said Senator Manchin. He said that people realize they need help but the resources of many facilities are already stretched thin and people can sometimes be turned away because there is no room. With money generated from this potential tax injured workers would hopefully have access to more treatment centers with a greater amount of beds or facilities to receive them. The money would also be used to hire more mental health providers, offer long-term treatment, housing and employment services for recovering addicts, and be used to help care for babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS).

In addition to the funding going towards treatment, portions of the funds generated would go towards equipping more first responders with naloxone and trying to ramp up prescription drug monitoring programs.

Text for the proposed bill can be found here.