Kentucky has more substance use treatment beds per capita than any other state.

But some lawmakers say too many people from outside Kentucky are taking up that bed space.

Kentucky addictions Jun Leffler has more on a bill that hopes to change that.

House Bill 408 would ban inpatient drug treatment facilities from accepting low income clients from out of.

State, trying to ensure that they don't recruit people from out of state and bring them here and put them on Medicaid.

So there's there's two potential penalties for the provider.

One is for the active recruiting and the other is for having that individual in their facility.

So it'd be $500 per day rather than on the individual.

It's now on the provider.

By refusing to treat people from outside the state who can't pay out of pocket.

This move could open up more slots to Kentucky residents and curb the state's Medicaid costs.

The bill also requires providers to try to get their clients back home after treatment.

Get them a one way ticket back home.

They can contact their family and ask them to come get them within 24 hours.

They can connect them with a mobile response team if available.

The bill's sponsor says otherwise these folks might end up homeless in communities they're not from.

But a Lexington Democrat suggests once a Kentuckian always a Kentuckian.

Would this bill apply to a Kentucky born and raised person who, having run the course of addiction here in Kentucky, then has fled to another state and then they're being essentially brought home?

I don't know if there's an opportunity to to create an amendment that someone who has substantial connections here may not be subject to this provision or not.

So thank you.

That's a great question and I appreciate the concern on it.

I'm happy to have the conversation with you and with others as well to figure that out, because I don't know if there's anything that defines, you know, people that have moved and are coming back.

So it's something we could look into.

The bill passed unanimously out of the House Health Services Committee.

The committee also advanced a bill that would make it easier for doctors to treat sepsis in a timely manner.

Many of you may know that for every hour of treatment delay in a case of sepsis, the mortality rate increases by 7%.

So the fact that sepsis is not a disease entity in itself, and therefore there's no diagnostic test that can be just quickly run and it can happen to anyone and to people with the very same illness from the very same organism.

Some people develop sepsis, some do not.

So that very unpredictability makes this early screening absolutely critical to saving lives.

If passed, House Bill 477 would require Medicaid to pay providers for all levels of sepsis care, not just severe cases.

For Kentucky, edition of June Leffler.

Sepsis deaths in Kentucky have declined in recent years, and 2021, the Kentucky Hospital Association created the Sepsis Kentucky Consortium.

It's equipped almost every Kentucky hospital with proven ways to triage and treat sepsis.