The winner of the Grand Jury Award for top documentary film at this year’s South by Southwest Film & TV Festival (SXSW) is Shuffle, a movie that takes an inside look at the for-profit addiction recovery business in the U.S. State of Florida, where rehab facilities are more plentiful than McDonald’s restaurants.

Shuffle is directed by Benjamin Flaherty, who is himself in recovery. It was while he was living at a “sober home” that he heard about treatment facilities buying patients for their insurance coverage. That began a three-year effort to document abuses in the recovery industry in Florida, part of a nationwide trend in for-profit addiction treatment.

Flaherty filmed interviews with dozens of people before narrowing down his story to three main “characters” he followed for several years. The patients are shuffled from facility to facility in an obviously fraudulent manner designed to maximize profits. Flaherty tells Variety:

I wasn’t prepared for how hard it would be to watch people stay sick.

During the making of the film, Flaherty attended AA-style meetings every day. He worked hard to not be one more person exploiting recovering addicts, instead working without a crew, one-on-one, and allowing them to tell their own stories. In a rather astute assessment of America’s free market healthcare system, Flaherty explains how recovering addicts get caught up in it:

I believe the treatment system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: create profit. The addiction treatment policy in the U.S. is an economic solution to a public health crisis, a solution designed to create financial incentives and a marketplace of services.

Flaherty continues, “all this is happening regardless of whether anyone gets sober because the financial incentives are not tied to any positive outcomes.” In bestowing the award, the SXSW jury noted, “[Flaherty] illuminates the insidiousness of the profit-driven, billion-dollar recovery business.”

Shuffle documents how treatment centers hire recruiters who are paid to find potential patients and get them to come to treatment facilities. If they have health insurance, it is milked for everything they can possibly charge for testing and services. A review of Shuffle in IndieWire says some rehab facilities don’t even restrict drinking or the use of drugs, and they pay addicts with insurance thousands of dollars to stay while they bill Medicaid tens of thousands. Flaherty tells Variety:

The financial incentive doesn’t encourage recovery. It encourages continued treatment, that’s where the profit is. Recovery, in this system of care, represents a loss of profit, a loss of business. That’s a fundamental conflict of interest.

Flaherty goes to pains to point out the devastating costs of untreated addiction to society in purely financial terms: the short, unproductive lives of many addicts; the costs for police, court systems, and jails; the costs to hospitals and clinics who treat the uninsured. “Simply by treating addiction,” Flaherty says, “the government saves billions.”

However, Flaherty believes there is a better way to provide addiction treatment that involves a nonprofit community of others involved in the same struggle. The problem is that some treatment facilities do not want to encourage recovery. Shuffle succeeds in doing what these treatment centers fail to do: seeing the human dignity of those who struggle to get free from alcohol and drugs.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published March 24, 2025.

Sources:

“White Privilege Satire ‘Slanted’ and Addiction Industry Exposé ‘Shuffle’ Take Top Awards at SXSW,” Variety, March 12, 2025.

“SXSW Doc ‘Shuffle’ Reveals How Rehab Facilities Prey on Addicts for the Sake of Profit,” Variety, March 12, 2025.

“Shuffle’ Review: Recovering Addicts Become Prey in Benjamin Flaherty’s Moving Exposé on Rehabilitation Facilities Designed to Fail,” Variety, March 18, 2025.

“‘Shuffle’ Review: A Depressing Look at the Rehab Centers That Prefer to Keep Patients Addicted,” IndieWire, March 14, 2025.

Image Copyright: John Biehler, used under Creative Commons license.