Eberstadt quotes from the award-winning 2016 book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones. As one passage in Dreamland explains:
[The Medicaid card] pays for medicine—whatever pills a doctor deems that the insured patient needs. Among those who receive Medicaid cards are people on state welfare or on a federal disability program known as SSI. . . . If you could get a prescription from a willing doctor—and Portsmouth had plenty of them—Medicaid health-insurance cards paid for that prescription every month. For a three-dollar Medicaid co-pay, therefore, addicts got pills priced at thousands of dollars, with the difference paid for by U.S. and state taxpayers. A user could turn around and sell those pills, obtained for that three-dollar co-pay, for as much as ten thousand dollars on the street.
“In 21st-century America, ‘dependence on government’ has thus come to take on an entirely new meaning,” Eberstadt sardonically observes.
It sounds like either a loophole that needs to be closed, or a bigger issue of drug pricing that needs to be addressed.
Back where I grew up, cases of heroin overdoses have skyrocketed. I don't know what's causing the rate increase, and it's being seen elsewhere too, but we need to re-think our "war on drugs" because it doesn't seem to be working effectively.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
The Feds were concerned about opioid prescription drug abuse so they really clamped down on the doctors who were prescribing the drugs. The patients with dependencies went to the street. So on one hand, prescription drug deaths declined, but the negative was that street drug deaths increased. Leads to a real quandary, do the Feds return to ignoring prescription drug abuse? The problem with street drugs is that the potency varies especially as you go from dealer to dealer or move around the country. It might be the lesser evil to let the addicts continue to access a legal and regulated supply.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
