More on the Opiate Abuse Epidemic: Where Again Does the Finger Point?

In arecentblog post we pointed to conservatives ' efforts to implicate Medicaid funding as somehow causative of, or at least promoting, the opiate " crisis. " After all, funding for medications means people will use, and sometimes abuse, those medications. Meds they might otherwise ill be able to afford. (Implied solution: cut Medicaid.)We also alluded to some of the logical fallacies in such thinking. Here, though, let ' s take it to another level: the blame game, where does it lead? Where does the finger point? Those who agree with Ronald Reagan that government is the problem, not the solution, fall into the trap of blaming public action and civic institutional development for the ills of our society.But gosh, why is it that private actors get a bye? Isn ' t it possible that something other than public action could end up being the culprit? What creates this blind spot?For one thing, those (they ' re discussed in the blog link above) who point fingers at Medicaid overlook inconvenient truths. Take the state-by-state data. True, West Virginia is among the top states, as it happens, for both Medicaid and addiction rates. But then look at New Hampshire, With Ohio, it is a close second foraddictionbut affluent enough to be near the bottom ofstates receivingMedicaid/CHIP. Somehow the great conservative logicians seem to miss data like this.For another thing, when you go from the " faceless bureaucrats " to the families that run things in this country, there ' s the matter of pri...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Source Type: blogs