President Trump declared America’s opioid crisis a public health emergency Thursday, decrying the “scourge of drug addiction” that kills 175 Americans a day and pledging that “we can be the generation that ends the opioid epidemic.”
“We want the next generation of young Americans to know the blessings of a drug-free life,” Trump said. “Each of us has a responsibility to this effort. We have a total responsibility to ourselves, to our family, to our country, including those who are struggling with this addiction.”
Trump’s emergency declaration will allow the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) to immediately divert discretionary funding toward combating the crisis, allow HHS to hire addiction professionals more quickly, and expand citizens’s access to addiction telemedicine.
The president’s critics immediately decried what he didn’t do with the declaration: ask Congress to allocate additional new funding for opioid treatment specifically. According to Politico, the declaration “disappointed state officials and public health experts.”
“People are dying,” Andrew Kolodny of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing told Politico. “We have people dying of overdoses on waiting lists for an effective treatment.”
But not all addiction treatment advocates were disappointed. Dr. Corey Waller of the American Society of Addiction Medicine praised the declaration as “a big step” toward fighting a crisis that has become America’s leading cause of accidental death.
“I’m happy that we’re seeing follow-through on the commitment to address this as the crisis that it is,” Waller, who practices medicine in Michigan, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “There are two ways to add money to the system. One is to just add more money, and the other is to reallocate. Rotating money toward addiction out of other budgets is no different than adding money to the pot as far as addiction is concerned.”
Waller also praised Trump’s promise to expand state waivers of the so-called IMD exclusion, which prevents Medicare money from going to addiction treatment centers with more than 16 beds in one place.
“When they deinstitutionalized mental health treatment, it also allowed for lack of capability to expand access to treatment, because right now if you want to get paid for Medicaid you can only have 16 beds,” Waller said. “When you say you want to rapidly expand treatment, that means you would have to build an entirely different building, and in many cases not even have the same ownership.”
Congress may eventually get around to allocating more money to fight the opioid crisis. But giving HHS the ability to be more flexible with the money they already have is a concrete way to help addicts immediately, Waller said.
“In this state,” he said, “we don’t need $30 billion in band aids.”
