Senate Republicans have found a new enemy in America's opioid epidemic: Medicaid.
On Wednesday, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), will hold a hearing focused on the impact of Medicaid on the opioid epidemic. Along with the hearing, Johnson also released a report and an op-ed that attempt to blame Medicaid — and the Medicaid expansion funded by the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) — for at least part of the growth in drug overdose deaths over the past several years.
The basic argument: Medicaid, particularly through the Obamacare-funded expansion, gave patients greater access to opioid painkillers — by linking them to doctors who could prescribe the drugs and by paying for many of the pills. Patients then misused the opioids, shared the drugs with others, or sold them on the black market. That, the claim goes, fueled the current drug overdose crisis, which led to nearly 64,000 overdose deaths in 2016.
