State and local governments are receiving billions of dollars in settlements from companies that made, sold, or distributed prescription painkillers and were accused of fueling the opioid crisis. More than a dozen companies will pay the money over nearly two decades. As of late February 2024, more than $4.3 billion had landed in government coffers.
KFF Health News has been tracking how that money is used — or misused — nationwide.
But determining how much of that windfall arrived in a specific county or city — and how much will follow in the future — can be challenging. Most localities are not required to make the information public.
BrownGreer, the court-appointed firm administering the settlements, tracks much of this data but kept it private until KFF Health News negotiated to obtain it last year. KFF Health News made that information public for the first time last June.
Five months later, BrownGreer began quietly posting updated versions of the information on a public website.
Roma Petkauskas, a partner at BrownGreer, told KFF Health News that the change was made to assist state and local governments in accessing the information easily and “to promote transparency into the administration” of the settlements. She said the data is updated “regularly when new payments are issued,” which can be as frequent as twice a month.
KFF Health News downloaded the data on March 4 and transformed it from state-by-state spreadsheets with separate entries for each settling company to a searchable database. Users can determine the total dollar amount their city, county, or state has received or expects to receive each year.
Determining how much money has arrived is the first step in assessing whether the settlements will make a dent in the nation’s ad …
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State and local governments are receiving billions of dollars in settlements from companies that made, sold, or distributed prescription painkillers and were accused of fueling the opioid crisis. More than a dozen companies will pay the money over nearly two decades. As of late February 2024, more than $4.3 billion had landed in government coffers.
KFF Health News has been tracking how that money is used — or misused — nationwide.
But determining how much of that windfall arrived in a specific county or city — and how much will follow in the future — can be challenging. Most localities are not required to make the information public.
BrownGreer, the court-appointed firm administering the settlements, tracks much of this data but kept it private until KFF Health News negotiated to obtain it last year. KFF Health News made that information public for the first time last June.
Five months later, BrownGreer began quietly posting updated versions of the information on a public website.
Roma Petkauskas, a partner at BrownGreer, told KFF Health News that the change was made to assist state and local governments in accessing the information easily and “to promote transparency into the administration” of the settlements. She said the data is updated “regularly when new payments are issued,” which can be as frequent as twice a month.
KFF Health News downloaded the data on March 4 and transformed it from state-by-state spreadsheets with separate entries for each settling company to a searchable database. Users can determine the total dollar amount their city, county, or state has received or expects to receive each year.
Determining how much money has arrived is the first step in assessing whether the settlements will make a dent in the nation’s ad …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]