“Contradicting a popular conservative talking point, new research shows that Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act helped states treat residents with addiction and didn’t change prescription painkiller fill rates.
“This supports the idea that Medicaid expansion has been beneficial in increasing the number of people receiving an important addiction treatment,” said Brendan Saloner, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author of the study, which was published this month in the journal JAMA Network Open.
The researchers compared California, Maryland and Washington, where Medicaid was expanded under the ACA, to Florida and Georgia, where it wasn’t, and found that prescription fills for the addiction medication buprenorphine combined with the overdose reversal antidote naloxone increased significantly in expansion counties. In comparison, prescription fills for opioid painkillers remained about the same after Medicaid expansion, although more patients paid for those prescriptions using Medicaid.”
Read more at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/medicaid-expansion-opioid-crisis_us_5b7da74fe4b0348585fce059
Source: HuffingtonPost.com – August 23, 2018
