Democratic Candidates Take on Opioid Addiction
Docs need to ‘get their act together’ and stop overprescribing, Sanders says
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Physicians have to “get their act together” to help stop the opioid addiction epidemic, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said at a Democratic presidential candidates’ debate here Saturday.
“I think we have got to tell the medical profession and doctors who are prescribing opiates and the pharmaceutical industry that they have got to start getting their act together,” Sanders said. “We cannot have this huge number of opiates out there throughout this country where young people are taking them, getting hooked, and then going to heroin.“
In addition, “We need to understand that addiction is a disease, not a criminal activity, and that means radically changing the way we deal with mental health and addiction issues,” he continued. “When somebody is addicted and seeking help, they should not have to wait 3, 4 months in order to get that help. They should be able to walk in the door tomorrow and get a variety of treatments that work for them.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also chimed in. “On the prescribing end, there are too many opioids being prescribed and that leads directly to heroin addiction,” she said. “We have to change the way we [do] law enforcement and we need more programs and facilities so when somebody is ready to get help, there’s a place for them to go, and every law enforcement [officer] should carry the antidote to overdose, naloxone, so they can save lives that are on the brink of expiring.”
As did his two opponents, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley agreed that “We need to rein in the overprescribing” and added that he thought the problem needed a $12 billion federal investment. “We have to invest in local partnerships, and [what is] the best place to intervene? The best indicator of when a person is on the verge of killing themselves because of an addiction, is [found] at the hospital. That very first time they show up with a ‘near miss,’ we should be intervening there.”
“That’s what I said to my own public health people — ‘What would we do if this were Ebola? How would we act?'” he continued. “So many more Americans have been killed by the combination of heroin and these highly addictive pain pills, and yet we refuse to act. There are things that can be done … It’s one of 15 strategic goals I’ve set up to make our country a better place by cutting these sorts of deaths in half in the next 5 years.”
Two of the candidates were also asked how they would improve on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Clinton pointed to several successes of the ACA, including its prohibition on insurance discrimination against people with preexisting conditions and the fact that women are no longer charged more than men for insurance. However, she added, “Out-of-pocket costs have gone up too much and prescription drug costs have gone through the roof.”
Clinton said she would propose a $5,000 tax credit to help people with large out-of-pocket costs. “I [also] want Medicare to be able to negotiate for lower drug prices just like [drug companies] negotiate with other countries’ health systems … and I want us to be absolutely clear about making sure the insurance companies in the private employer policy arena, as well as in the ACA exchanges, are properly regulated so that we are not being gamed. We don’t have enough competition and don’t have enough oversight of what the insurance companies are charging everybody right now.”
Sanders, who noted that he serves on a Senate committee that helped to write the ACA, said that despite all the progress it has produced, “not only are deductibles rising, 29 million Americans still have no health insurance and millions of people can’t afford to go to the doctor — a major crisis in primary healthcare.”
The reason that the U.S. doesn’t yet have a single-payer healthcare system “ties into campaign finance reform — the insurance companies and the drug companies are bribing the U.S. Congress,” he said. “We need to pass a ‘Medicare for All’ single-payer system; it will lower the cost of healthcare for a middle-class family by thousands of dollars a year.”
O’Malley was not asked to answer the ACA question. However, his website states that he will simplify Medicare by combining hospital care, physician services, and prescription drugs into a single plan; increase support for primary care services; work to get more states to expand their Medicaid programs; and enforce antitrust law to counter large increases in healthcare costs.
Filed under: General Problems
How many of you pain patients out there have used heroin?
How many of you have thought about using heroin?
I myself have been using my prescribed opioid medications for several years to treat chronic back and neck pain. The thought of using heroin has never ever crossed my mind and never will. I would rather eat a bullet then play Russian Roulette by sticking a needle in my own vein.
As with the fictional tv show “The X-Files, the truth is out there”, and it’s not prescription opiates causing the addiction issue as much as the readily available illegal street drugs like meth, heroin and synthetic pot.
Get your facts straight politicians, start listening to the people who are suffering, not the bureaucrats who are in the pockets of Big Pharma, Insurance companies and addiction facilities who are only in it for the money.
Start looking for the cause of the addiction issue, not the product of addiction. You can’t arrest a bullet for murder, you have to arrest the person who fired the bullet.
Our political system needs to look into the injuries that is causing workers to have the need for opiates. They need to stop these injuries before they happen and the need for pain medications will drop severely.
We need safer work environments and we need to make employers responsible for accidents in the workplace.
Further more, better testing like MRI and CT scans should be required for any and all spinal / back injuries that happen at work.
Because most major problems with spinal injuries don’t seem to present themselves until later on in life, all medical records for work related injuries need to be kept indefinitely by the employer and all future problems directly related to the initial injury need to be paid for by this employer whether the injured still is working for that company or not.
Start putting stricter safty requirements on employers like the ones mentioned above and we will start seeing a major reduction in addiction.
CRPS is the most debilitating pain condition I’ve had the non pleasure of having. It comes with a long list of comorbid conditions to compound the issues. I live 24/7 365 days a year plus leap year because we don’t get a break. I have tried SCS which causes my condition to spread. I’ve tried massage which landed me into the ER because my autonomic system doesn’t work properly anymore. I’ve tried meditation, soothing music, essential oils, change in diet and exercise (only Pilates) to try and ease my pain due to #undertreatedpain
This war on drugs is going to kill more people than help. To live like this is should be a crime. To purposely not treat my pain as a dr should is torture. I suggest you get to know the CRPS/RSD community and encourage the CDC,DEA and anyone else to help us find a cure so we don’t have to take meds to have any type of quality of life. People can’t live in this much pain without the proper treatment. We are all different an require different meds. Some metabolize quicker others have gastroparesis so meds aren’t absorbed like a normal person taking meds. We need research and pain relief for our community along with other chronic pain conditions (which I have those too)
The deaths in our community will be on the governments hands and WE will take this to the supreme courts if needed. #painedlivesmatter
#crps
If you want to help fight the government, send the request to be a member of the closed group called chronic pain patients for DEA reform. Check out the group and if you don’t like it you don’t have to stay. I would just like you to take a look at it.
I was utterly disappointed when I heard the dem candidates leave this discussion to a short and typical response. Clearly they don’t know more than what the CDC is saying, and it’s wrong. I hope people are writing to their candidate of choice to point out a few facts!
Okay, so apparently we need to get a shovel, dig up Lyndon Baines Johnson’s corpse, hold a seance, and ask him what the bleep we were supposed to do with Medicare after it ran out of money. Because the present generation of Democrats just can’t wrap their teeny little minds around the concept, that 100 MILLION OF US ARE IN PAIN AND WANT TO STOP IT.
If the best they can offer, is to send 100 million people to an addiction treatment center and tell us it’s all in our heads, they’re bloody delusional. Because we’re still in pain, after we play all the silly mind games that are played on us in those centers.
Sanders, O’Malley, and Clinton, all get their position on pain care from George Bush. It’s all in our heads, shut up, stop screaming, obey the Leader’s words as if they contain wisdom. Ask no questions.
I, for one, refuse to waste my vote on any of these fools.
Bob we will need a shovel also to dig two graves of all the people who cannot take another day of unrelenting pain and decide to fix it once and for all. After all, the government can’t stop us from taking our own lies wants a take away the only medication that made our lives somewhat bearable.