President Trump Declares Opioid Crisis a National Emergency

Working off of the recent recommendations in the interim report issued by the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, President Donald Trump has issued a directive to his administration to use all “appropriate emergency and other authorities to respond to the crisis caused by the opioid epidemic.” Some of the immediate actions the Trump administration could take to address the opioid crisis include: (1) approve state waivers to remove the Medicaid Institutions for Mental Diseases (IMD) exclusion, which prohibits the use of federal Medicaid funds for care provided to most patients in mental health and substance use disorder residential treatment facilities larger than 16 beds; (2) negotiate lower prices for naloxone (the drug that reverses opioid overdoses) as suggested by the Commission; and (3) distributing some of the $45 million in the Public Health Emergency Fund. Earlier this week, President Trump suggested the administration would combat the epidemic by focusing on law enforcement and security on the southern border to stop illegal drugs from entering the country. The emergency declaration may allow the government to deploy the U.S. Public Health Service, a uniformed service of physicians and other staffers that can target places with little medical care or drug treatment, said Andrew Kolodny, co-director of opioid policy research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. He said the DEA might...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs