‘We fail people’: New data on disparities in Medicaid access to opioid addiction treatment
An estimated 82,998 people died from opioid overdoses in the U.S. last year. A new study published in JAMA Health Forum drives home how lack of access to life-saving medications could contribute to such needless deaths.
The study is the most comprehensive Medicaid analysis of opioid addiction to date, analyzing a national claims dataset with 76 million patient data points between 2016 and 2018. Medicaid patients are already at disproportionate risk of opioid overdoses, almost four times higher than patients on commercial insurance. Correspondingly, Medicaid is one of the primary payers of opioid addiction treatment in the US, covering nearly 40% of adults under 65 with this chronic disease.
