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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRepublicans Just Tried to Claim that Medicaid Caused the Opioid Epidemic...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/republicans-just-tried-to-claim-that-medicaid-caused-the-opioid-epidemic-surprise-surprise-theyre-wrong/Republicans Just Tried to Claim that Medicaid Caused the Opioid Epidemic. Surprise, SurpriseTheyre Wrong.
Nice try.
Julia Lurie
Jan. 17, 2018 4:45 PM
Republicans seem to have found a new culprit to blame for the opioid epidemic: Medicaid.
On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), held a hearing on the supposed connection between Medicaid and Americas drug crisis. Johnsons thesis, summed up in a report his team published today, is that Medicaid recipients are taking advantage of their free healthcare by selling their pain pills. The evidence, he argues, is the fact that states that expanded Medicaid have higher overdose ratesand his finding that 1,072 Americans have been charged or convicted of improperly using Medicaid to get pain pills since 2010.
The theory, which has been making its way around the conservative blogosphere for months, adds to the Republican critique of Medicaid: Free healthcare for the poor is not only disincentivizing Americans from working by providing free healthcareits enabling those on it to make money by diverting their pills. Every time a hard working American pays their taxes, they are inadvertently funding drug dealers with a new supply of high powered opioids that are poisoning our schools and our streets, testified Otto Shalk, a prosecuting attorney from Indiana. With the increased amount of the impoverished having access to medical care, there is a greater likelihood that those who are impoverished are going to see the opportunity for turning a profit, albeit illegal, on the street.
The thing is, the argument doesnt stand up to scrutiny. Its true that overdose rates are higher in the 31 states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and its true that opioid abuse is more common among poor Americans. But Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act took place in 2014nearly twenty years after overdose rates started creeping up, and three years after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called the crisis an epidemic. (Check out our timeline of the epidemic for more details.)
Plus, todays opioid epidemic is fueled by illicit fentanyl and heroin, which kill far more Americans than prescription opioids. Theres ample evidence to suggest that these illicit drug markets sprang up in the same places where opioids were overprescribed, and many of these states would later expand Medicaid. Todays epidemic started with overzealous pharmaceutical marketing and liberal prescribing, not access to healthcare, noted Andrew Kolodny, co-director of opioid policy research at Brandeis University, in his testimony. As he said, Opioid overdoses have been increasing in people with all types of insurance and in people from all economic groups, from rich to poor.
The irony is that Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act gave millions of Americans access to addiction treatment coveragewhich researchers on the right and left agree is key to solving the drug crisis. (Brandi, a recovering drug user who attributes her progress to her newfound addiction treatment coverage, is one example.) But recent Republican legislationlike the repeal of the individual mandate under recently enacted tax plan, or the proposed Medicaid work requirementscould cripple that progress. As Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry professor and Obama policy advisor, told me last year, Obamacare was designed to be very broad, but at the same time we knew that if there was anything that this would help a lot for, its addiction.
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Republicans Just Tried to Claim that Medicaid Caused the Opioid Epidemic... (Original Post)
babylonsister
Jan 2018
OP
Hard working American. Code for "now comes the lie". ACA covers addiction treatment, or used
Fred Sanders
Jan 2018
#2
underpants
(182,834 posts)1. See what happens when you give people access to science?
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)2. Hard working American. Code for "now comes the lie". ACA covers addiction treatment, or used
to until R's decided party over science once again. They are vile and stupid and blinded by religion.
Vinca
(50,279 posts)3. By this theory, everyone in the prosperous and healthy countries with demon "socialized" medicine
must be addicted to opioids. Republicans are unable to think beyond talking points passed around. They could be exposed to a deadly disease themselves just by standing next to a sick person who DOESN'T have Medicaid. It's not just a "non hard working American" issue (or, if you're a Republican, any poor black or brown person), it's a public health issue.