Boston Globe via Getty Images A pill of buprenorphine, also known as Suboxone. Extensive research has shown people with opioid addiction who are prescribed buprenorphine or methadone are less likely to relapse and overdose than those who try to recover without medication.
Contradicting a popular conservative talking point, new research shows that Medicaid[1] expansion under the Affordable Care Act[2] helped states treat residents with addiction and didn’t change prescription painkiller fill rates.
“This supports the idea that Medicaid expansion has been beneficial in increasing the number of people receiving an important addiction treatment,” said Brendan Saloner, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author of the study, which was published this month in the journal JAMA Network Open[3].
“The ultimate goal of getting people into addiction treatment is giving them better and longer lives,” he said.
The researchers compared California, Maryland and Washington, where Medicaid was expanded under the ACA, to Florida and Georgia, where it wasn’t, and found that prescription fills for the addiction medication buprenorphine combined with the overdose reversal antidote naloxone increased significantly in expansion counties. In comparison, prescription fills for opioid painkillers remained about the same after Medicaid expansion, although more patients paid for those prescriptions using Medicaid.
The new findings stand in contrast to a series[4] of Wall Street Journal[5] editorials[6], which were written in response to an investigation and a report by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.)[7] claiming Medicaid expansion helped fuel the opioid crisis.
The new study did