On a summer afternoon in 2009, eight Kaiser Permanente doctors met in Pasadena to review the HMO’s most prescribed drugs in Southern California. Sun blasted through the windows and the room had no air conditioning, but what unsettled the doctors most were the slides a pharmacist was presenting.
“We were doing so much work treating people with hypertension and diabetes, we thought those drugs would be on the list,” said Joel Hyatt, then Kaiser's quality-management director in Southern California.
Instead, hydrocodone, a generic opioid painkiller, led the list. OxyContin was near the top, even though the HMO didn’t subsidize it and patients had to pay for it themselves.
[For more of this story, written by Sam Quinones, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/he...tors-opioids/518931/]
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