The Rehab Racket: Investigating the high cost of addiction care

Reporter German Lopez is looking into America’s notoriously opaque addiction treatment industry, which affects thousands of people each year.

America is facing a harrowing opioid epidemic, one that kills thousands of people each year. But the rehab system that could help combat the crisis is failing. It is far too expensive for typical families and often provides addiction treatments that aren’t proven or actually have evidence against their use.

“The problem in the industry isn’t that we have a few bad actors,” Tami Mark, a health economist at the research foundation RTI International, told me. “It’s that a large portion of the addiction industry isn’t providing the type of care that we know leads to recovery.”

We’re shining a light on these problems, and how they’re affecting people, financially and otherwise, every day. You can read the first story in the series, The Rehab Racket, here.

As part of this series, we’re crowdsourcing patients and families’ rehab stories, with an emphasis on the cost of treatment and quality of care. If you’d like to help our reporting by sharing your story, please fill out this survey.

If you don’t have a story to share but would like to follow along, you can sign up for our email newsletter to get updates on the project.