Some other healthcare issues

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Meanwhile, with everybody focusing on the voter fraud non-issue..

Disproportionally affecting poorer women, no surprise there..

Pushing to make Hyde permanent is “doubling down on harmful policy, and disregarding the health of low-income women and other women who receive health insurance coverage and care through the federal government,” said Megan Donovan, senior policy manager at the Guttmacher Institute.

As it turns out, a lot of people get their health insurance through the federal government — federal employees, military service members, incarcerated people, Native Americans who use Indian health service facilities, and people who are insured through Medicaid. The Medicaid ban in particular means that abortion is already disproportionately unaffordable for poor women, young women, and women of color — all of whom are more likely to need abortions in the first place.

About one in six women of reproductive age rely on Medicaid for their health insurance. Currently, 17 states have a policy to use their own state Medicaid funds to pay for abortion services — but 60 percent of women on Medicaid don’t live in those states, so they can’t get any insurance coverage for abortion at all.

More than half of those women who can’t get any coverage are women of color. The bill could also effectively eliminate private insurance coverage of abortion If HR 7 were passed into law, it could “effectively ban” private insurers from covering abortion through plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges, Jamila Taylor, a senior fellow in women’s health at the Center for American Progress, told Vox.

To be clear, HR 7 doesn’t ban abortion coverage directly. Instead, it gives insurers almost no other choice but to stop offering plans on the ACA exchanges that cover abortion. Under HR 7, women who buy an insurance plan that covers abortion through the ACA exchanges won’t be able to receive government subsidies. And without those subsidies, buying insurance through the Affordable Care Act is a lot less affordable.

The House just passed a sweeping abortion funding ban. Here’s what it does. - Vox

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Price, however, used a common myth to denigrate the value of this treatment, arguing that taking opioids like methadone or buprenorphine to treat opioid addiction is really just substituting one opioid for another. This doesn’t just go against decades of research; it also fundamentally misunderstands addiction. The issue isn’t just that someone is using drugs, but that someone is using drugs in a way that endangers them. Yet this myth has been used time and time again to deny medication-assisted treatment to opioid users — sometimes to literally deadly results. Medication-assisted treatment works. Period.

Trump’s top health official got a basic fact about opioid addiction very, very wrong - Vox

What happened to evidence based policies?

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Yea, combatting the opiate epidemic by cutting the budget 95%..

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ® on Tuesday said he has “good reason to believe” the Trump administration will not make massive budget cuts to the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).

Asked by ABC News’s “Good Morning America” about the proposed 95 percent cut to the office, Christie said he doesn’t “believe it’s going to happen.” “So you’ve expressed that to the president?” host George Stephanopoulos asked. “I just don’t believe it’s going to happen, George,” Christie said. Pushed on the potential steep cuts, Christie insisted he does not believe the office budget will be gutted.  “I have a good reason to believe it’s not going to happen,” Christie said.  “You’ve been assured it’s not going to happen?” Stephanopoulos asked. “I have good reason to believe it’s not going to happen, George,” Christie reiterated. The White House is proposing to cut nearly the entire budget for the ONDCP, slashing its funding by about 95 percent, The Hill was told last week. In late March, Trump signed an executive order creating a commission to combat opioid addiction, helmed by Christie.

Christie: ‘Good reason to believe’ Trump won’t gut anti-drug office budget | TheHill

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War on drugs take II. Hasn't this approach failed for decades, cost billions of dollars and wrecked countless lives?

President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions weren’t kidding when they promised to ramp up the war on drugs.

On Friday, Sessions took his first big step as attorney general to escalate America’s drug war: He rescinded an Obama-era memo sent out by then-Attorney General Eric Holder in 2013, which told federal prosecutors to avoid charges for low-level drug offenders that could trigger lengthy mandatory minimums.

The Trump administration just took its first big step to escalate the war on drugs - Vox

President Trump came into office promising to end the opioid crisis that is now killing more than 30,000 Americans a year. Full stop.
But since January, people who work on the issue have been in a near-constant state of panic. Almost every signal from the Trump administration has been one of retrenchment on drug addiction, not embracing the public health mentality favored by advocates.

On multiple fronts, Trump's team has given the recovery community reason to worry:

• The president is weighing the almost complete elimination of the White House "drug czar" office, per Politico. The office has some baggage from its war on drugs days, but many recovery advocates believe it could be their seat at the White House table with the right leader.
  
• Trump has proposed major spending cuts across the public health spectrum: CDC, NIH, HHS, etc. "The White House has stated many times that the opioid epidemic and drug addiction is a high priority," Andrew Kessler, a lobbyist who works on the opioid crisis, told me. "In Washington, however, priorities are illustrated through budgets."
  
• The House health care bill that Trump is pushing would cut spending for Medicaid — the single largest payer of addiction services in the country — by more than $800 billion over 10 years. It would also allow states to opt out of the Obamacare rule that health plans cover certain services, including addiction treatment.
  
• HHS Secretary Tom Price disparaged medication-assisted treatment, widely considered an essential tool in combating addiction and preventing overdoses, this week. “If we’re just substituting one opioid for another, we’re not moving the dial much,” he said. “Folks need to be cured so they can be productive members of society and realize their dreams.”
  
• Attorney General Jeff Sessions is considering reprioritizing mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenses, reversing a change made by the Obama administration that was seen as deescalating the war on drugs.
  

Trump said he would end the opioid crisis. When’s he going to start? - Vox