‘We fail people’: New data on disparities in Medicaid access to opioid addiction treatment
Overall, the study found that 55% of Medicaid enrollees with opioid addiction received some medication treatment nationwide.
An estimated 82,998 people died from opioid overdoses in the U.S. last year. A new study published Friday in JAMA Health Forum drives home how lack of access to lifesaving medications could contribute to these preventable 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 U.S., covering nearly 40% of adults under 65 with this chronic disease.
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