The radical tax and expenditure package signed by President Donald Trump earlier this month can lead to thousands of people losing access to opioid use disorder, which leads around 1,000 extra deaths through overdose every year.
Fatal overdoses have been taken since they have one Record high in 2022. Drug policy and health experts have credited the decrease in public health measures on a large scale, such as investments in treatments, expansion of therapies and decreasing stigma.
But now they fear that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will undo that progress.
The day before the bill passed the house, a group of researchers sent a memo For house speaker Mike Johnson and Senate majority leader John Thune, estimates that the package would lead to around 156,000 people losing access to opioid user disorder. The next day the bill knew the house and the next day Trump signed it in the law.
“I am angry,” says Dr. Benjamin Linas, the main researcher behind the Memo and a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Boston University. “I think it’s a terrible policy. I think it does nothing but make America unhealthy and increase misery.”
The provisions of the bill that focus on Medicaid are expected to leave around 7.8 million people without health insurance in 2034 due to loss of coverage under the program, according to the Conference budget office. With the help of that estimate projected Linas and his colleagues, based on previous data on the proportion of people about Medicaid who receive medicines for opioid use disorder, how many of those people will probably lose access to treatments. They then used simulation modeling to estimate how many extra fatal overdoses would take place in one year.
Linas called the findings ‘disturbing’, and added that the 1,000 extra death researchers were probably an underestimation because he and his colleagues only took into account that people had no access to their medication for opioid user disorder – not for other health complications that could aggravate after losing access or leasehold insurance.
Researchers also do not explain the possibility that medicaid cuts can lead to some people losing access to their preferred medication, so that they can use another option, which can cause “misery and suffering and death”, says Linas.
“It is known and documented that if people cannot get the treatment that is effective for them or that they would choose, the treatments are less effective and they fall outside the care,” says Linas.
President Dr. Stephen Taylor of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), who was not involved in writing the memo, says that although the effects of the bill will vary from state to state, he thought the findings of the researchers reasonably. He notes that the bill has one provisions For people with drug use disorder, including the exemption from work requirements.
“Our focus on ASAM is just to try to reduce part of the damage damage [and] Make sure these exemptions … will be implemented as extensive and as generous as possible, “says Taylor.” We want to prevent people from losing the coverage they need; Otherwise those exemptions will be meaningless. “
But Linas also points out that many people who struggle with addiction are not diagnosed, making it difficult for them to gain access to such exemptions.
The deaths of overdoses fell by almost 27% in the US from 2023 to 2024, according to facts Released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in May. That is about 81 lives that are saved every day, the CDC estimated. The number of deaths due to overdoses specifically involved with opioids fell from approximately 83,140 in 2023 to 54,743 in 2024, according to the CDC. In one rackThe CDC said that the federal government has increased the efforts to tackle the issue, since Trump declared the Opioid epidemic in October 2017, months after his first term, in October 2017.
However, since Trump returned to the office in January, his second administration has suggested vague cuts on programs that focus on addiction treatment and investigation, while the efforts to tackle the crisis targeted About combating drug trafficking from other countries. Many experts in the field of public health and addiction criticized The aggressive strategy, which says it does not effectively tackle the drug crisis.
Linas says that he attributes the decline of the deaths due to overdose to fighting drug dealers and the border is “completely untrue”; Instead, he says, the credit must go to strengthen public health measures.
The damage that the tax and spending package is expected to cause in opioid treatment, he says, is an example of broader problems in the way in which the Trump administration rules.
“After having worked so hard and seeing progress, it is really depressing to take such a step back,” says Linas. “It is also a microcosm of the total chaos that this administration imposes on us all. Because we already invest a lot of federal dollars a year ago to turn the course of this overdose epidemic and see the results, and now we are just going to pick up a 180 and it is pretty miserable.”
#Big #Beautiful #Bill #lead #fatal #overdoses