The government, through JCAHO, also helped create the opioid crisis, with their push for the healthcare system to treat pain as the "fifth vital sign". Note tha

The government, through JCAHO, also helped create the opioid crisis, with their push for the healthcare system to treat pain as the "fifth vital sign". Note that while JCAHO is supposedly a non-profit, JCAHO accreditation is a requirement for receiving medicare and medicaid funding from the government, which makes it a pretty big stick to beat the healthcare system with. Of course, now that large amounts of patient harm are recognized as a result, the regulators and bureaucrats are extremely quick to dodge any responsibility, summarized well here with quotes from various JCAHO publications in the past: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6139759/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6139759/