Occupational Licensing and the Opioid Crisis

The United States\u27 affordable care crisis and chronic physician shortage have required nurse practitioners to assume increasingly important roles in the healthcare system. Nurse practitioners can address critical access-to-care problems, provide safe and effective care, and lower the cost of care. However, restrictive occupational licensing laws - specifically, scope-of-practice laws - have limited their ability to care for patients. Spurred by interest groups opposed to allowing nurse practitioners to practice independently, states require physician supervision of nurse practitioners. Research has discredited many of the traditional reasons for these restrictive laws, but emerging arguments assert that independent practice will deepen the ongoing opioid crisis by allowing unsupervised nurse practitioners to overprescribe opioids. The opioid crisis has become one of the defining public health emergency of this generation, so these arguments warrant serious investigation. If granting nurse practitioners independence will exacerbate the opioid epidemic, restricting their practices may be justified despite the clear benefits that independence could create for patients and the healthcare system. This Article provides new empirical evidence on the role of nurse practitioner independence in opioid prescriptions by analyzing a dataset of approximately 1.5 billion individual opioid prescriptions. Containing information on approximately 90% of all prescriptions filled at outpatient pharmacies between 2011 and 2018, this dataset provides unprecedented insight into the ongoing opioid epidemic. An analysis of these data reveals that allowing nurse practitioners to practice independently reduces the quantity of opioids prescribed across all physicians and nurse practitioners. Thus, this Article demonstrates that, contrary to exacerbating the opioid crisis, granting nurse practitioners independence is a valid policy option for addressing this crisis. These results can inform the ongoing state and national debates over nurse practitioner scope-of-practice laws and the opioid epidemic more generally. And based on these results, the Article proposes several policy options at the state and federal levels that could both address restrictive scope-of-practice laws and ameliorate the ongoing opioid crisis