As of February 1, 2021, the national Ketamine Taskforce for Access to Safe Care and Insurance Coverage has been launched. The Taskforce has a mission to ensure access for pain and mental health patients to safe ketamine treatments through insurance coverage of the therapies.
Latest government estimates show that 50 million Americans are estimated to experience chronic pain and 50 million are estimated to live with a mental health condition (with much overlap between the two populations). The great news for these patients is that ketamine, an FDA-approved anesthetic, has been used off-label for both mental health and pain conditions for decades with high efficacy and safety.
The unfortunate news is that insurance organizations around the country typically consider the use “experimental” and therefore do not cover it in its entirety or at rates that are fair to ketamine providers. This has left the tens of millions of Americans experiencing mental health conditions and pain with huge suffering and lack of access to affordable treatments. This presents a huge obstacle to the majority of mental health and pain patients who are forced to forego this life changing treatment because they cannot afford to pay out of pocket.
In light of this heartbreaking reality, the Ketamine Taskforce was created to increase access to lifesaving ketamine treatments. The Taskforce brings together patients, doctors, nurse anesthetists, nurse practitioners and researchers from around the country behind this goal.
The Taskforce has built an Advocacy Clinic Consortium — a network of clinics who are aligned in this mission and who plan to contribute aggregated, de-identified real-world data on the efficacy of ketamine for analysis and submission to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The Taskforce has already made progress on an application for adequate reimbursement coverage to CMS, who has requested real-world evidence to aid its diligence process.
