Medicaid payment policies for methadone maintenance treatment for opioid use disorder, 2020-2025
Yuhua Bao, Promi Chakraborty, Kayla Hutchings, Shashi N Kapadia, Noa Krawczyk, Bruce R Schackman, Barbara Andraka-Christou, Ju-Chen Hu · 2026
Read Medicaid payment policies for methadone maintenance treatment for opioid use disorder, 2020-2025 by Yuhua Bao, Promi Chakraborty, Kayla Hutchings, Shashi N Kapadia, Noa Krawczyk, Bruce R Schackman, Barbara Andraka-Christou, Ju-Chen Hu (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13505517.txt.
Description
Bao and colleagues tracked in 2026 how state Medicaid programs paid clinics for methadone treatment of opioid addiction across five years of policy change. Federal rules loosened in 2020 and became permanent in 2024, letting clinics send stable patients home with more doses. Pay rules, though, can quietly push clinics back toward daily visits.
The team gathered payment rules from 40 states, covering March 2020 to July 2025, and charted the changes. More than half the states still paid per dose or per day, tying clinic income to how often patients show up. Over a quarter kept an old flat bundle that rewards at most a week of take-home doses. A two-tier bundle modeled on Medicare spread slowly. The authors warn that flexible care will lag until payment matches the new rules.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Yuhua Bao, Promi Chakraborty, Kayla Hutchings, Shashi N Kapadia, Noa Krawczyk, Bruce R Schackman, Barbara Andraka-Christou, Ju-Chen Hu |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 30 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |