AMA Opposed to ‘Blacklisting’ of Doctors Over Rx Opioids
/By Pat Anson, PNN Editor
The American Medical Association is hardening its opposition to public and private policies that seek to limit opioid prescribing. The AMA House of Delegates this week passed resolutions calling for prescribing guidelines to be amended to allow physicians to use their own clinical judgement to decide if higher doses of opioids are medically necessary. The AMA’s ruling body also called for an end to the “blacklisting” of doctors who prescribe high doses.
The AMA didn’t always feel this way about guidelines. When the CDC released its controversial opioid guideline in 2016, the AMA sent a letter to CDC Director Thomas Frieden that “applauded the CDC for treating the epidemic of opioid overdose deaths as a high priority.” And Patrice Harris, MD, a psychiatrist who chaired an AMA Task Force to Reduce Opioid Abuse, said the AMA was “largely supportive of the guidelines.”
Harris, who recently became the AMA President, now says the guidelines “have no basis in science.”
“Physicians can’t be expected to fight the epidemic with one hand tied behind their back, handicapped by policies that limit choices for patients and have no basis in science,” Harris said in a statement.
The AMA House of Delegates finally took a stand against the CDC guideline last November, when it passed resolutions opposing the “misapplication” of the guideline by pharmacists, insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, states and regulatory agencies.
Although the 2016 guideline is voluntary, it has resulted in many patients being forcibly tapered to lower doses, cutoff entirely or even abandoned by their doctors – all under the guise of preventing opioid addiction and overdoses.
This week’s resolutions by the AMA’s ruling body went a step further, calling for an end to the “inappropriate use” of the CDC guideline to set dosing limits and blacklist physicians who exceed them.
RESOLVED that our AMA support balanced opioid sparing policies that are not based on hard thresholds, but on patient individuality, and help ensure safe prescribing practices, minimize workflow disruptions, and ensure patients have access to their medications in a timely manner, without additional, cumbersome documentation requirements.
RESOLVED that our AMA oppose the use of “high prescriber” lists used by national pharmacy chains, pharmacy benefit manager companies or health insurance companies when those lists do not provide due process and are used to blacklist physicians from writing prescriptions for controlled substances and preventing patients from having their prescriptions filled at their pharmacy of choice.
RESOLVED that our AMA incorporate into their advocacy that clinical practice guidelines specific to cancer treatment, palliative care, and end-of-life be utilized in lieu of CDC’s Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain as per CDC’s clarifying recommendation.
The CDC’s so-called clarification came in a commentary published April 24 in The New England Journal of Medicine. Three authors of the guideline did not take any responsibility for the poor implementation of their recommendations, but acknowledged that “some policies and practices purportedly derived from the guideline have in fact been inconsistent with, and often go beyond, its recommendations.”
Nearly two months later, not a single word of the CDC guideline has been clarified or changed, and insurers, pharmacies and many states continue to enforce its voluntary recommendations as mandatory policy.
Doctors who prescribe high doses of controlled substances are also being blacklisted by the DEA and state medical boards, which routinely use prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) to identify and target physicians who are considered “high prescribers.”
Federal prosecutors have also sent letters to hundreds of physicians warning them that their opioid prescribing practices could subject them to criminal prosecution — often without any evidence that their patients were harmed by the drugs.
