Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Thursday, August 30th, 2018

Republicans claimed Medicaid made the opioid epidemic worse. A new study proves them wrong.

Author:     German Lopez
Source:     VOX
Publication Date:     Aug 28, 2018, 10:20am EDT
 Link: Republicans claimed Medicaid made the opioid epidemic worse. A new study proves them wrong.
Stephan:   This report is a story of what happens to a nation when the wellbeing of the culture is not the main consideration. Consider this report on opioids, a completely legal manufactured addiction crisis that became a huge profit generator for everyone but the addicts. The United States permitted pharmaceutical corporations to literally kill thousands of Americans in order to enrich themselves.  And when the opportunity presented itself to fix the problem, the Republicans claimed Medicaid only made matters worse. But they lied. Here are the facts.

In January, Senate Republicans set their sights on a new foe in the opioid epidemic: the Obamacare-funded Medicaid expansion.

With the release of a report and an ensuing hearing, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), suggested that the expansion of the public health insurance program for low-income Americans had made the opioid crisis worse.

The claim: After Obamacare encouraged states to expand Medicaid to include everyone at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty level (around $16,750 a year for an individual), more people obtained access to opioid painkillers, since they now could get to doctors to prescribe the drugs and had a health plan to pay for the opioids. And that may have led them to addiction or, at the very least, made opioids more available to misuse and sell in illicit markets.

But a new study published in JAMA Network Open put this claim through empirical tests — and the claim failed. In fact, the study found that the Medicaid expansion may help combat the opioid crisis by expanding or maintaining access to […]

Read the Full Article