Addiction treatment providers are notoriously underpaid by health insurers across the US. That leads to big shortages in supply, because it makes it very difficult to start a sustainable addiction treatment facility. What Virginia did was use the big health plan it has control over — Medicaid, which covers low-income people — to boost reimbursement rates to addiction treatment providers.
The state started the program, the Addiction and Recovery Treatment Services (ARTS), in April 2017. Although ARTS is still fairly new, independent evaluations from researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) have already found some promising results.
After the program went into effect, the percent of Medicaid members with an opioid use disorder who received treatment went up by 29 percent from April to December 2017 compared to the same period the previous year. At the same time, emergency department visits related to opioid use disorders went down by 31 percent. That was more than double the 15 percent reduction in emergency department use among all state Medicaid members during the same time frame.
Read more here: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/10/17256572/opioid-epidemic-virginia-medicaid-expansion-arts