The human and economic importance of supporting addiction treatment
It’s been said many times, but it merits repeating: The U.S. is in the middle of an unprecedented drug crisis. According to a new report from the Ohio Department of Health, the number of opioid-related deaths leapt from 296 in 2003 to 2,590 in 2015 — a 775 percent increase. Those statistics are repeated from coast to coast: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that drug-overdose deaths involving heroin tripled from 8 percent in 2010 to 25 percent in 2015.
That comes with a huge price tag: In Stark County, Ohio (Canton), the drug epidemic costs $75,000 a year in toxicology tests alone. And on Friday, March 10, the Stark County coroner’s office requested a cold-storage trailer from the state to act as an overflow morgue; they got it.
Nationally, the Department of Health and Human Services estimates that in 2015, the opioid epidemic cost $55 billion in health and social services and $20 billion in emergency department and inpatient care for opioid poisonings. Letting the epidemic go unchecked would be a disaster and could financially cripple small municipalities like Canton.
Yet, as of this writing, the latest proposed health care bill ends the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that addiction services and mental health treatment be covered under Medicaid (in the 31 states that expanded the health care program). The Medicare expansion provides treatment for around 1.3 million people.