PETE NIELSEN DOES HIS THING –
Feb. 12, 2021 – CCAPP knew they had to act to stop this new adversary that threatened to abuse patients and cast a cloud of doubt over the legitimacy of the treatment itself. As soon as the legislature reconvened in 2016, the organization sponsored the first anti-kickback legislation for the industry. A full year before the Eliminating Kickbacks in Recovery Act (EKRA) was passed by Congress, CCAPP partnered with Senator Steven Bradford (D-Los Angeles) to introduce Senate Bill 636, Addiction Treatment Kickbacks, to provide the state with the tools needed to prosecute those in the business of selling addiction patient placements and paying people to relapse and re-enter treatment and the response from Bradford’s colleagues in the legislature – incredulity. They did not believe the practice was occurring, let alone widespread enough to warrant a new law to address it. Undeterred, CCAPP gathered anecdotal cases to find and garnered a coalition of programs and people in recovery to push the bill forward. It would take another year to convince the legislature that the new law was necessary. In 2018, Bradford again introduced anti-kickback legislation (SB 1268), which eventually caught the attention of the state’s future Insurance Commissioner, Senator Ricardo Lara, who lifted Bradford’s language and amended his SB 1228 to include its anti-kickback provisions in the waning hours of the two-year session to get the bill to the Governor’s desk where it was signed in 2018.
