The Radical Tax and Expenditure Package that President Donald Trump reported earlier this month could lose thousands of people to treat opioid consumption disorders, resulting in around 1,000 additional overdose deaths each year, the researchers say.
Mortal overdoses have been down since they reached a record level in 2022.
But now they fear that Trump’s “great invoice” will cancel these progress.
The day before the bill, a group of researchers sent a memo to the president of the Mike Johnson Chamber and the head of the majority of the Senate John Thune, believing that the package would lead to around 156,000 people to lose access to the treatment of disorders of the use of opioids. The next day, the bill cleaned the house and the next day, Trump signed it.
“I am angry,” said Dr. Benjamin Linas, principal researcher behind the memo and professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Boston. “I think it’s a terrible policy. I think it only makes America unhealthy and growing. ”
The provisions of the bill targeting Medicaid should leave around 7.8 million people without health insurance in 2034 due to the loss of coverage within the framework of the program, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Using this estimate, the Linas and its colleagues have projected, on the previous database on the proportion of people on Medicaid who receive drugs for opioid disorder, how many of these people will probably lose access to treatments. They then used the simulation modeling to estimate the number of additional deadly overdoses in terms of one year.
The LINAS qualified the results of “upset”, adding that the 1,000 additional deaths that the researchers projected were probably an underestimation because he and his colleagues only explained that people who are unable to access their drugs for a disorder of opioid – not for any other health complication that could worsen after having lost access to health insurance, infections cancer.
The researchers also did not take into account the possibility that Medicaid cuts can encourage some people to lose access to their favorite medicines, forcing them to use a different option, which could cause “misery, suffering and death,” says Linas.
“It is well known and documented that when people cannot obtain the treatment that is effective or choose, the treatments are less effective and they fall under the shelter,” explains Linas.
The president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), Dr. Stephen Taylor, who was not involved in the drafting of the note, says that if the impacts of the bill will vary from one state to another, he found that the conclusions of the researchers were reasonable. He notes that the bill has provisions for people with substance consumption disorders, in particular by exempting them from work requirements.
“Our goal at Asam is just to try to mitigate certain damage to the bill [and] Make sure these exemptions … will be implemented in a way as large and as generous as possible, “says Taylor.” We want to prevent people from losing the cover they need; Otherwise, these exemptions will be meaningless. »»
But the Linas also emphasize that many people who are getting involved are not diagnosed, which could make them difficult to access such exemptions.
Overdose deaths decreased almost 27% in the United States from 2023 to 2024, according to data published by US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in May. This comes out at around 81 lives saved each day, estimated the CDC. The number of overdose deaths specifically involving opioids dropped from around 83,140 in 2023 to 54,743 in 2024, according to the CDC. In a statement, the CDC said the federal government has increased efforts to resolve the problem since Trump declared the Opioid epidemic for public health emergency in October 2017, months after its first mandate.
Since Trump remained in office in January, however, his second administration has proposed scanning discounts of the programs dedicated to treatment and research on drug addiction, while his efforts to face the crisis have focused on the fight against drug trafficking in other countries. Many experts in public health and drug addiction have criticized the aggressive strategy, saying that it does not effectively deal with the drug crisis.
Linas says to award the drop in overdose deaths to the reduction of drug traffickers and the border is “completely false”; Instead, he says, credit should go to strengthen public health measures.
The damage that the tax and expenses package should cause treatment to opioids, he says, illustrates wider problems in the way the Trump administration governs.
“After working so hard and seeing progress, taking a step back is really depressing,” says Linas. “It is also a microcosm of total chaos that this administration imposes on us all. Because recently that a year ago, we invest a lot of federal dollars to reverse the course of this overdose epidemic and start to see results, and now we will simply take an 180 and refer it – it’s quite miserable. “
