“One of the biggest drivers of America’s opioid epidemic is Medicaid, and ObamaCare’s expansion of the program has only made matters worse, claims a new report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, drug overdoses were the leading cause of accidental death in the United States in 2016, accounting for almost 64,000 deaths. Adjusting for age, the rate of drug-overdose deaths more than tripled between 1999 and 2016. Abuse of opioids such as oxycodone is one of the primary reasons for this increase.
How does Medicaid play into this? For its beneficiaries, it makes drugs dirt-cheap. At most, patients are subjected to a small copayment, sometimes as low as one dollar for 240 opioid pills; in 12 states, adults on Medicaid pay nothing at all for prescription drugs. The street price of those drugs, meanwhile, can be quite high: The report states that those 240 pills could sell for as much as $4,000.”
Read more at: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/health-care/item/28134-medicaid-obamacare-driving-opioid-epidemic-senate-report
Source: TheNewAmerican.com – January 26, 2018
