Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), genius, has been obsessed with Medicaid and the evils of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion for a long time. Johnson has also become aware of the fact that the country has been experiencing an opioid crisis for years. In the last year or so, in his dim brain, these things coalesced and he's been harping on the Medicaid caused the opioid crisis thing for months now. He even cooked up a report about it. Unfortunately for the larger world, Johnson serves in Mitch McConnell's Republican Senate, so he has a committee chairmanship. That means the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is holding a hearing on the thing that is really not an issue, as explained by Vox reporter German Lopez.
But this claim runs into a basic problem: the concept of time. Medicaid didn't expand under Obamacare until 2014—well after opioid overdose deaths started rising (in the late 1990s), after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2011 declared the crisis an epidemic, and as the crisis became more about illicit opioids, such as heroin and fentanyl, rather than conventional opioid painkillers.
"It's pretty ridiculous," Andrew Kolodny, an opioid policy expert at Brandeis University who's scheduled to testify at the Senate hearing, told me. […]
There's another basic time problem with the Republican theory: The nature of the opioid crisis has, if anything, shifted away from opioid painkillers since the Medicaid expansion began. Starting around 2011, opioid painkiller overdose deaths began to level off. That same year, heroin overdose death began to rise. Then in 2014, overdose deaths linked to synthetic opioids like illicit fentanyl began to rapidly increase as well—and now these synthetic opioids are the biggest cause of overdose death in the US. […]
Given the evidence, Kolodny argued that the new hearing and report are really about a broader Republican agenda to cut Medicaid. After all, this is something that Republicans have been trying to do for years; as House Speaker Paul Ryan once said, he's been "dreaming" of cutting Medicaid since he and his buddies were "drinking out of kegs."
"People are using the opioid addiction epidemic to further their own political agenda," Kolodny said. "That bothers me. I think it becomes a distraction."
Lopez extensively reviews the literature here, actual analysis by public health and policy experts that debunks pretty much every assertion Johnson's "report" makes. Johnson's committee should be tasked with the real causes and effects of the opioid crisis which is killing tens of thousands of people annually. There's a reason this is called a "crisis."
But Johnson's a Republican, so of course he's going to use the epidemic for political purposes. Furthermore, he's a Republican from Wisconsin, so he's going to use it to try to destroy a program that helps poor people.