(WAMC- 1/13/2025) In Massachusetts, one of the last major pieces of legislation to be signed into law in 2024 was an omnibus bill, geared toward substance use disorders and support for those affected. WAMC spoke with one of the bill’s biggest proponents in the Senate about just what the new act does.
Governor Maura Healey, lawmakers and others gathered at the State House Friday for a ceremonial signing of “An Act relative to treatments and coverage for substance use disorder and recovery coach licensure.”
It was officially signed a few weeks earlier. Packing multiple reforms and mandates, the bill includes a requirement that insurance plans cover opioid reversal drugs, like naloxone and Narcan. It also establishes official licensure for recovery coaches while mandating health plans cover their services.
Governing a state that’s seen over 2,000 opioid-related overdose deaths a year since 2016, Healey noted many of the changes are steps in an ongoing journey to address addiction – a disease that “knows no bounds,” she says.
“I think today, for all of us, is about the victims,” Healy said in front of the Grand Staircase. “Because it kills me that so many have suffered. It really kills me that so many have been in pain in many ways, at the hands of and through the greed of companies, corporations that would exploit people’s pain for their own profit.”
In her last role, Healey was among the first state attorneys general to pursue multi-million dollar lawsuits against those who profited off the nation’s opioid epidemic, including the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma.
Years later, the epidemic’s effects persist, with some data suggesting overdose deaths are, marginally, trending in the right direction, says Hampden and Hampshire State Senator John Velis.
A recent Department of Public Health report suggested opioid-related overdose deaths decreased 10 percent in 2023, “the largest single-year decline since 2009-2010.”
On a fundamental level, Velis tells WAMC, the bill looks to continue that trend.
“… from my standpoint, I am absolutely sick and tired – I am a person in recovery myself, long-term recovery – and I see on a daily basis, in my recovery networks, the number of people that I’d … see them one day and then a month would go by, no longer see that individual and ask someone, ‘Hey, what happened to such and such?’ and the news you get breaks your heart – they’re no longer with us. They died of a drug overdose,” he said in a phone interview.
Velis, who chaired the Joint Committee on Mental Health, Substance Use and Recovery last session, has been open about his own battle with and recovery from alcoholism.
He also played a key role in getting the omnibus bill across the finish line, serving on the conference committee that pushed it through in mid-December, after it passed both chambers of the legislature earlier in the year, but stalled out at the end of July.
He spoke with WAMC shortly after it cleared conference committee and was awaiting the governor’s signature.
Provisions include language barring life insurance companies from limiting or outright refusing coverage of someone solely due to them obtaining an emergency opioid antagonist or EOA in the past, like Naloxone.
It also supports harm reduction organizations, ensuring they’re protected from “civil or criminal liability and professional disciplinary actions if they are providing drug checking services in good faith,” according to Velis’s office.
One of the bigger victories, the Democrat says, is the codification and establishment of recovery coach licensure, with oversight involving the DPH.
“The problem is that there was never a process, a licensure – so, there was all these insurance questions and many people who otherwise would have gone into trying to be a recovery coach as a profession wouldn’t do it because there was just so many unknowns,” he explained. “… you talk to anybody who does this work on the ground, they’re going to say that recovery coaches, literally, are God’s gift to this earth, because, again, that shared, lived-experience really, really moves mountains.”
Both Velis and Healey have emphasized the job isn’t done when it comes to improving services and reducing overdose deaths.
Velis says the process requires nuance, patience and time, especially when relapsing is common for people in recovery.
“So, harm reduction is a big part of this – just the realization that everybody’s going to get this thing, get their recovery at a different time, and what we need to do, until they get to that point, is we need to keep them alive,” Velis said. “There’s an old adage that you cannot treat somebody who is dead, and that’s what a lot of this bill recognizes, that we need to keep people alive so they can get to a point where they want to, themselves, turn their lives around and be their best selves.”