For a while it fell on Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner to "solve" the opioid crisis. Then the task was very quietly delegated to, of all people, administration liar Kellyanne Conway. There's still no commitment to spending any serious amount of money to combat what the White House has called a national emergency, mind you, but there have been meetings held and reports filed and everyone agrees that reducing opioid abuse is urgent in principle, if not practice.
Meanwhile, the Republican tax plan is about to make the problem much, much worse. The Senate's version of the bill repeals the requirement that most Americans either have insurance or pay a tax penalty for not having it. The intent of the repeal is to deprive the insurance marketplace of the sort of younger, healthier individuals that don't think they need health insurance, until one unfortunate day in which they do; by removing these individuals from the insurance pool, insurers are left to insure a population that skews older, and sicker, which raises premiums and hopefully, Obamacare opponents presume, renders those markets untenable for insurers and the insured alike.
The hitch to all of that is that the people who do not think they need health insurance or who do not want to pay for it can also be people with serious, or potentially fatal, addiction problems.
Amid a spiraling opioid epidemic and record-high alcohol-related deaths, the legislation could put Obamacare on track toward a “death spiral,” says Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry and former Obama drug policy adviser. He adds that the health-related provisions would hurt most in places that voted for Republican politicians: Those counties that swung for Trump in the election had higher rates of “deaths of despair,” or deaths from alcohol, drugs, and suicide. [...]
Many of those who would lose insurance—either because they choose not to buy it or because they’re priced out due to rising premiums—are likely to be young or low-income, two groups with particularly high substance abuse rates, notes Keith Humphreys. Just a few weeks of addiction treatment can be prohibitively expensive for many Americans. “Not having insurance will make them vulnerable,” added Humphreys. “One thing that is consistent when you talk to addicted people is how they never thought this would happen to them.”
The GOP Tax Scam is a "working definition of a tax boondoggle" for banks, big oil, developers—and it still needs to pass both houses of Congress before it becomes law. Call your members of the House AGAIN TODAY at (202) 224-3121, and tell them you are absolutely furious and they must vote NO.
The whole point of universal health insurance is that nobody, in general, "expects" to have health problems. But they happen anyway, reliably, and to everyone. The people who don't think they need health insurance, or can't afford health insurance, or simply want to spend their money on other things then show up in the nation's emergency rooms with life-threatening problems and no ability to pay, boosting medical costs for everyone else.
Destabilizing the insurance markets will, of course, kill people. But simply axing the individual insurance mandate will kill Americans as well, and those suffering from opioid addiction are disproportionately in that group. Treatment for such addiction is expensive. For most Americans without insurance, it is unattainable.
The Republican pledge to "solve" this crisis, then, continues to seem insincere.