Each year 17 million adults have a serious problem with alcohol, yet only 3 million get help. Alcohol problems kill, sicken or injure hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.

Finding and treating alcohol problems early can reduce risky behaviors associated with alcohol consumption, such as drunk driving, and it can save lives. A promising technique for doing this is called Screening and Brief Intervention (SBI). Hospital emergency rooms in several states are using this technique with patients to address problem drinking and addiction.

With SBI, physicians or other health professionals administer simple screening tests or questionnaires to discern whether a patient has an alcohol problem. Depending on the severity of the problem, physicians may conduct brief interventions—short counseling sessions to discuss problem drinking and its health risks—with patients in the emergency room. These sessions may last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.

Brief intervention can motivate risky drinkers to seek help and can significantly reduce the health and other risks that stem from drinking. And although SBI is not designed to treat alcoholism, which requires greater expertise and more intensive case management, it may be helpful in motivating patients with alcoholism to engage in more intensive, long-term treatment.

Despite the availability of this proven, cost-effective treatment for alcohol problems, physicians and patients in many states face a roadblock to SBI: Alcohol exclusion laws (AELs). AELs allow insurers to sell health and accident insurance policies that will not pay for injuries that occur while the insured person is under the influence of alcohol. When benefits are denied, injured people can't pay for medical care. To avoid bankrupting their patients, many physicians and hospital managers avoid any activity—include measuring blood alcohol levels or screening for alcohol problems—that might result in an alcohol-related diagnosis.

AELs do nothing to deter dangerous behavior like drunk driving because most people don't know that the exclusions are in their policies until they suffer an injury or are involved in an accident. In fact, the laws discourage people with alcohol problems from getting the help they need and prevent long-term solutions to problems like drunk driving.

Meanwhile, more than 40 studies show that SBI in health care settings, including emergency rooms and trauma centers, reduces DUIs, alcohol-related arrests and injury-related hospital readmissions. It also saves the healthcare system—and taxpayers—money:

• A recent study demonstrated that every $1 spent on alcohol screening and intervention for an injured patient saves $3.81 in overall health expenditures.

• If a brief intervention were offered to every eligible injured person in the U.S., the resulting savings from healthcare costs alone would be approximately $1.8 billion annually.

• Trauma patients who received just 30 minutes of post-screening counseling have been demonstrated to have 48% fewer readmissions to the hospital and 28 fewer drinks per person per week than patients who did not receive counseling.