Seniors Left Waiting as Treatment Bill Faces Uphill Climb - Behavioral Health Business
By Ashleigh Hollowell
| Date | October 20, 2026 |
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This is an exclusive BHB+ story.
Many adult seniors have been locked out of accessing residential addiction treatment for the sector’s entire history. Still, around 1 in 15 adults over the age of 65 have had a substance use disorder in the past year.
Despite decades of advances in access for Medicaid recipients, Medicare coverage for non-hospital residential treatment has remained excluded from the plan for beneficiaries.
Recently reintroduced legislation called the “Residential Recovery for Seniors Act” could change that, but the bill’s chances of passing and becoming law are slim.
Seniors in the U.S. who are 65 and older accounted for 8,195 drug overdose deaths in 2024, according to the CDC’s most recent data. Yet, fewer than one in five Medicare enrollees with opioid use disorders even received medication to treat their addictions.
A separate study found that the quality of OUD treatment any of these beneficiaries do receive is typically low and even not up to par with treatment services Medicaid recipients receive. Medicare Advantage performed even worse than fee-for-service Medicare on six of eight quality measures the researchers looked at as well.
This has laid the groundwork for a perfect storm: a patient population with growing needs, but few ways to access it, leaving many to fall through the gaps.
“I can’t understand why anybody would not want senior citizens to have access to quality residential addiction treatment,” Dr. Stephen Taylor, president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), told Behavioral Health Business. “Without that, you’re going to have folks either showing up in hospitals and ending up in the much more expensive treatment setting of hospitals, or they’re going to end up in a lower-tier clinical treatment setting where they’re not getting the adequate care that they need.”
Even intensified payer focus on lowering total cost of care across commercial, Medicaid and Medicare plans hasn’t brought many others to champion the cause alongside providers. It has been an ongoing fight for decades. And that is likely to continue for a while, despite bipartisan support.