Clean, Sober and $41,000 Deep in Out-of-Pocket Addiction Recovery Costs

Tess Henry with her rescue dogs, in a photo taken by her mother. Ms. Henry was the subject of a recent Sunday Review essay, which generated over 400 reader comments.
Credit Patricia Mehrmann

People recovering from opioid addiction and their families discuss the financial and emotional costs of treatment.

Tess Henry’s family paid $12,000 for 30 days of rehab from opioid addiction. She had done two more cycles of treatment without achieving sobriety. So her family agreed to pay $20,000 for 28 days of more rehab. But they never got the chance.

A few days after assuring her mother that she planned to fly to Virginia to resume treatment, Ms. Henry was murdered.

The tragic end of Ms. Henry’s six-year struggle to recover from an opioid addiction that began with a prescription for cough syrup was chronicled last week in The New York Times by Beth Macy, a journalist who covers the opioid crisis.

It takes eight years, and four to five attempts at treatment, for the average person addicted to opioids to achieve one year of remission, according to John Kelly, a researcher and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, whom Ms. Macy cited in her Sunday Review essay.

Some people manage to achieve recovery through free 12-step programs, while others spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Ms. Henry’s story prompted readers to share with us in our comments section their own struggles with recovery or the struggles of their family members.

Here is a selection of the comments that cite costs — in out-of-pocket expenses, as well as in time, insurance payouts and human patience — of recovery. They are condensed and lightly edited.

‘I’m lucky it didn’t cost me more’

$25,000 for Suboxone, $16,000 of doctor appointments, $200,000 paid by insurance

I abused opiates for four years. I quit one-time and have been sober for five years. I’ve been on Suboxone [a drug that helps prevent opioid withdrawal symptoms] for five years as well. Luckily I make enough money to spend $400/month on Suboxone. I also moved 1,500 miles away from where I bought OxyContin when I quit, went to a $100,000 rehab on private insurance, and then stayed for 10 more months working as a nighttime janitor and going to A.A. like 10 times a week.

Recovering from opiates has cost me over $25,000 for Suboxone, $16,000 of doctor appointments, and it’s cost my insurance about $200,000. It cost me five years of my life. I’m lucky it didn’t cost me more.

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