Senate Republicans blame Medicaid for increased opioid deaths - Entrepreneur Generations

"Republicans in the U.S. Senate are trying out an interesting scapegoating tactic when it comes to the escalation of the nation’s opioid crisis. They are pointing the finger of blame at Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health care coverage to millions of low-income Americans," Quinn Libson reports for Route Fifty.

The root of their argument: Medicaid has increased patients' access to prescription medications, including opioids; some of those patients abuse their prescription opioids and some sell them on the black market. So says a report released Jan. 17 by Sen Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, held a hearing that same day with the goal of revealing the "unintended consequences" of Medicaid.

It isn't the first time Johnson and other Republican lawmakers have said such a thing. In July 2017, Johnson wrote a letter making the same claim to the Health and Human Services Department's inspector general. "Because opioids are so available and inexpensive through Medicaid," Johnson wrote, "it appears that the program has created a perverse incentive for people to use opioids, sell them for large profits, and stay hooked."

But the facts don't bear out that argument, Quinn reports: "Across the country, the argument that Medicaid expansion catalyzed or worsened the overdose crisis crumbles with an examination of the timeline and evolution of the epidemic."

Andrew Goodman-Bacon, an assistant professor of economics at Vanderbilt University, and Emma Sandoe, a health policy Ph.D student at Harvard University, analyzed Johnson's claim that Medicaid expansion caused the opioid epidemic. According to their findings, published in Health Affairs, the claim is not credible for three main reasons:

First, trends in opioid deaths nationally and by Medicaid expansion status predate the ACA. Second, counties with the largest coverage gains actually experienced smaller increases in drug-related mortality than counties with smaller coverage gains. Third, the fact that Medicaid recipients fill more opioid prescriptions than non-recipients largely reflects greater levels of disability and chronic illness in the populations that Medicaid serves. While we do not reject the possibility that public policy has played a role in our current prescription abuse crisis, on balance we find little evidence to support the idea that Medicaid caused or worsened the epidemic.

from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2n1JSQ7 Senate Republicans blame Medicaid for increased opioid deaths - Entrepreneur Generations

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