As the Republican Party attempts to throw the American public off the scent of the stinking pile of poo they are trying to peddle to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, ThinkProgress reports that Ohio Rep. Jim Renacci has decided to resurrect an oldie but a goldie insane lie:
“Medicaid was, in some ways, the driver of this opioid addiction,” Renacci said, in an interview on WAKR radio. “…If [the expansion was] needed, how come 19 states that have not expanded Medicaid are doing better than Ohio? And how come Ohio, who’s the number one state dependent on Medicaid expansion, is also the number one state for opioid overdose and addiction? The numbers and the facts just don’t lie.”
As ThinkProgress points out, the National Review—probably best known for keeping a flame for Sen. Ted Cruz this past election—tried to pass off this bit of batshit craziness a couple of years ago. In an article entitled “Has Medicaid Made the Opioid Epidemic Worse?” a man named Sam Adolphsen argued that Medicaid expansion gave opioid addicts and potential addicts easier and cheaper access to the drugs. It’s this same thinking that recently had Wisconsin’s answer to brains, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, espouse this very same theory out loud. Of course, on the face of it, this “theory” sounds like a possible thing. But like virtually everything out of the mouths of these morons, the actual facts and trends of our country’s opioid problem disagree.
Doctors have used opioids to manage acute pain since before the 20th century. In 1995, the American Pain Society labeled pain the “fifth vital sign,” and in 1996, Purdue Pharma developed OxyContin, a controlled-release opioid that they (falsely) claimed would deter addiction. Opioid use, abuse, and mortality increased rapidly thereafter. In just five years from 1997 to 2002, OxyContin prescriptions for non-cancer pain grew from 670,000 to 6.2 million. Drug-related mortality rates doubled between 1999 and 2013. In contrast, most states that expanded Medicaid began offering benefits in January 2014. (Six states expanded early but limited coverage.) The claim that Medicaid expansion is “largely responsible for starting the epidemic in the first place” is clearly false simply given this timeline. The opioid epidemic started decades before Medicaid expanded.
The fact of the matter is there are no easy answers to issues of addiction. But there are things that we do know, an example being that shunning and criminalizing drug addiction 100 percent does not work in curbing or saving the lives of people. Medicaid expansion has provided more addiction treatment to people in need, and the results of that ongoing experiment in treating addiction is under attack right now. The fact that the Republican Party continues to push for legislation that would literally mean untimely deaths of Americans is only matched by the fact they also continue to peddle propaganda to the public that would kill Americans.