WASHINGTON — As Republicans plan to overhaul Medicaid, the opioid crisis looms large.
More than 30,000 Americans are dying from heroin and painkiller overdoses every year. Hundreds of thousands of people covered by Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid — more than a million, by at least one estimate — have mental health and substance abuse issues.
The GOP plan could impact the program in two ways. First, it would eliminate in 2020 the requirement that states, which administer Medicaid and jointly fund it with the federal government, offer robust coverage of mental health and substance abuse services for people who enrolled in Medicaid under the Obamacare expansion. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, traditional Medicaid coverage of these services is often less generous than the expansion coverage. So the fear is that coverage for those people would be rolled back under the GOP’s plan.
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