The Trump "administration" response to the national opioid epidemic continues to be foiled by the same thing that has stalled innumerable would-be Republican promises before it: Nobody wants to spend any damn money on the thing.
President Trump’s bipartisan commission on the opioid crisis made dozens of final recommendations on Wednesday to combat a deadly addiction epidemic, ranging from creating more drug courts to vastly expanding access to medications that treat addiction, including in jails.
The commissioners did not specify how much money should be spent to carry out their suggestions, but they pressed Congress to “appropriate sufficient funds” in response to Mr. Trump’s declaration last week of a public health emergency.
The White House still hasn't given any hint that they want actual, budgeted funds to be a part of the administration response; as of the moment, the program remains entirely aspirational. And the odds of Republican leaders Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell agreeing to billions in new public health funding while in the middle of battles to cut the taxes of top income earners and cripple other healthcare reform efforts would seem to be, as an educated guess, zero.
Richard Frank, a health economics professor at Harvard Medical School who worked in the Obama administration, estimated that it could cost roughly $10 billion a year to provide medication and counseling to everyone with opioid use disorder who is not already in treatment. Treating opioid-dependent newborns, meeting the needs of children in foster care because of their parents’ addiction and treating hepatitis C and other illnesses common among opioid addicts would cost “many billions more,” Mr. Frank said.
Well, you can bet they won't be doing that. Congress has been fighting a bitter war over whether to give poor and/or uninsured newborn children food and/or health care they need for four decades. The Republican demand is that those programs be cut, cut, cut, to use our newest technical terms for such things.
Again, these Republican assurances that they will indeed be will be taking what they themselves portray as a national crisis of opioid addition have felt entirely aspirational. And, more to the point, insincere. Part of that is the installation of (sigh) Jared Kushner as a supposed point man for the effort; far more of it is based on the longstanding Republican resistance to spending substantive money on any public health crisis, a resistance that continues to this very moment and which shows not a single sign of abating.
So, ya know, nobody is holding their breath on this one. Perhaps the administration is serious about combating opioid use, or perhaps it is window-dressing to make it appear that an administration that roundly does not give a flying damn about the little people in any capacity, on any issue, might theoretically give a bit of a damn on this. If the White House, or Congress, is indeed serious, however, now would be the time to put up or shut up.