I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer,
to treat everything as if it were a nail
–Abraham Maslow, “Toward a Psychology of Being”
By: Jeff Cohen & Randy Goldberg
The dominant forces of change in the addiction treatment industry are law enforcement and insurance companies. The focus and impact of insurers is currently focused on the argument that what treatment providers do isn’t medically necessary. This rationale is undeniably misguided and is the biggest threat to the survival of many health care providers, including those at the forefront of adapting to the demands by implementing meaningful legal regulatory compliance. This focus of this article is a parallel intervening factor in the addiction treatment industry: that of law enforcement, most notably in Palm Beach County, Florida. Consequently, providers in the addiction treatment space and their employees are becoming increasingly familiar with the concept of immunity as they are deal with law enforcement on a routine basis.
We assume there are bad-actors in the addiction treatment space. There are bad-actors in every industry and profession. No one can appreciate that more than this article’s co-author, Randy Goldberg. He is a retired Florida law enforcement professional, who spent a significant portion of his career investigating law enforcement officers for alleged criminal misconduct, having been deeply involved in the arrest and successful prosecution of law enforcement officers who abused their authority and strayed to the dark-side of the law. Continue reading
