By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--January 30, 2018
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I'm convinced that an awful lot of the opioid crisis owes simply to current cultural attitudes about drugs, which is to say medicating everything from a sore back to a bad mood is not only fine but encouraged. And altering the workings of your brain just so you can escape reality for awhile? That's "recreation."
No drug abuse problem is quite as serious without these sad societal trends. You don't need to medicate every little thing, and you can have lots of fun in life without altering your consciousness. I don't know why that's hard for people to understand, but I guess you're never going to understand anything if you just plain don't want to.Yet Medicaid offers cheap access to astronomical quantities of pills that can be resold on the black market. For as low as a $1 co-pay Medicaid beneficiaries can get up to 240 oxycodone pills that can be resold for $4,000, according to the report. Since 2010 more than 1,000 people across the country have been charged or convicted of improper use of Medicaid to obtain prescription opioids. Mr. Johnson’s report captures some of the sordid specifics, including a case in Connecticut where a perpetrator “preyed on” Medicaid beneficiaries who were “down on their luck,” according to a detective the committee interviewed. The drug ring leader would pay Medicaid beneficiaries, say, $50 to get a prescription filled. Pharmacists tended to trust the Medicaid system and filled the scripts. Then the perpetrator would sell the opioids on the street for up to $3,000 for a single bottle. The perpetrator pleaded guilty to multiple charges in 2015.
Fraud is a feature of any government program, but here crime is especially lucrative. The Johnson report walks through everything from a drug ring in a Bronx bodega to a Maryland pharmacist who defrauded Medicaid for some $90,000 to a $1 billion fraud from a cabal of health-care providers in Miami. One notable point is that this crisis seems to be worse in states that expanded Medicaid as part of ObamaCare. More than 80% of nearly 300 cases were filed in Medicaid expansion states, the report found, with New York, Michigan, Louisiana, New Jersey and Ohio topping the roll call. Moreover, “the number of criminal cases increased 55 percent in the first four years after Medicaid expansion, from 2014 to 2017, compared to the four-year period before expansion.” This correlation doesn’t prove causation but certainly warrants a closer look from Health and Human Services and fair-minded academics. The left says Medicaid isn’t the problem and is essential to treating opioid addicts, though this overstates the case. Medicaid beneficiaries are often targeted by junk treatment centers that bill the government for reimbursement. The committee staff also found, “in preliminary research,” 243 recent instances of fraud involving opioids and Medicare, where abuse is by some reports worse. Veterans Affairs had several dozen opioid investigations running late last year.
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