From The Washington Post —
The researchers concluded that additional access to drug-abuse treatment was linked to a six percent lower overdose rate for states that allowed more people to enroll in Medicaid than in states that did not. That translated into 1,678 to 8,132 fewer deaths in those states from 2015 to 2017, they wrote in an examination of data from 49 states and the District of Columbia.
Critics of President Trump’s efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have frequently said that doing so conflicts with his work to stem the nation’s opioid crisis, which has taken more than 400,000 lives over the past two decades.
The new study appears to be the first to conduct a county-by-county examination of overdose deaths and Medicaid expansion. It found an 11 percent decline in the death rate from heroin overdoses and a 10 percent drop in deaths from illegal fentanyl and its analogues.
“As states invest more resources in addressing the opioid overdose epidemic, attention should be paid to the role that Medicaid expansion may play in reducing opioid overdose mortality,” most likely through the provision of anti-addiction medication, the researchers wrote.
The study found no link between Medicaid expansion and declines in overdose deaths from prescription narcotics. In an interview, the leaders of the research team — Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz of the University of California at Davis School of Medicine, and Magdalena Cerda of New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine — said that Medicaid expansion probably brought many of the poorest Americans into the insurance program. That group was more likely to be using street drugs than prescription narcotics, they said.