Georgia lawmaker says opioid crisis demands federal as well as state attention — and money

It’s almost impossible to glance at a newspaper, magazine, television newscast or website without at least one item about the growing American crisis of prescription pain medication abuse, addiction and overdose. The word “epidemic” is now inextricably connected in the public mind with the word “opioid,” and with statistically sound reasons.

Desperate times, as the saying goes, call for desperate measures. And given the political climate in the country right now, it’s hard to think of many more desperate, or at least unlikely, political measures than a Georgia Republican invoking the Affordable Care Act — yes, Obamacare — as part of a solution. But as reported last week by WABE, Atlanta’s National Public Radio affiliate, that’s exactly what state Sen. Renee Unterman, R-Buford, said the state must consider. The situation in Georgia is dire, she said, and the state needs the federal money that expanding Medicaid under the ACA would bring in.

“Right now,” she told WABE, “if you’re a young man and you are 18 to 35 years old and you’ve already run your family off, you have no money, you have no job and you’re addicted, there’s absolutely no place to go for addiction services.”

That federal money could and does provide such services, according to Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, who told NPR that his state had added 45 treatment clinics: “We’ve used the expansion; 125,000 people are getting treatment, and providers are getting reimbursed by the extended Medicaid.”

During the summer, when Republicans in Congress were engaged in one of the repeal/replace efforts, Unterman sent letters to both of Georgia’s U.S. senators, Johnny Isakson and David Perdue, urging caution. Cuts to Medicaid, she wrote, could “exacerbate the financial stress that opioid overdoses are putting on the emergency medical system. These cuts would affect county and private EMS, emergency rooms and treatment programs.”

Unterman is hardly a disinterested party — political convictions aside — on the issue of Medicaid cutting or expansion. She serves as chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee. She is also an executive of a company with a lucrative state contract — Amerigroup, which holds a billion-dollar-a-year Medicaid contract with the state of Georgia.

Given the severity of the problem and the frightening instability of health care politics nationwide right now, it’s hard to say where and how public interest, private interest and possible conflict of interest might converge here. But Unterman is not the only Georgia lawmaker, or the only Republican, who has suggested — if only by implication — that refusing Medicaid expansion under ACA might have been a politically stubborn and short-sighted decision.

In any event, the senator told WABE that countering the prescription pain drug abuse scourge will be near or at the top of her and her committee’s agenda in the 2018 session of the General Assembly. Given some of the hot-button trivialities with which lawmakers have wasted Georgia taxpayers’ time and money, we can think of worse priorities.

CORRECTION: Sen. Renee Unterman, R-Buford, chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, is a former executive of Amerigroup, an insurance and managed care company. She is no longer an employee.

This story was originally published October 30, 2017 at 5:20 PM with the headline "Georgia lawmaker says opioid crisis demands federal as well as state attention — and money."