Thursday, March 15, 2018

Trump's Comprehensive Plan To Fight Opioid Epidemic

THIS IS A COMPREHENSIVE PLAN TO FIGHT THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC.
The Trump administration is finalizing a long-awaited plan to fight the opioid epidemic that includes the death penalty for drug dealers where opioid, including Fentanyl-related, drug dealing and trafficking are directly responsible for death.
"If you shoot one person, they give you life, they give you the death penalty. These people can kill 2,000, 3,000 people and nothing happens to them," Trump said about opioid drug dealers. The plan also:
1) Changes how the government pays for opioid prescriptions to limit access to powerful painkillers. Trump hopes his plan will reduce opioid prescriptions by one-third within three years.
2) It calls on Congress to change how Medicaid pays for treatment, seeking to make it easier for patients with addictions to get inpatient care.
3) It would also create a new Justice Department task force that more aggressively monitors internet sales.
4) It endorses expanding first responders' access to naloxone, a medication used to reverse opioid overdoses.
5) It calls on states to adopt a prescription drug monitoring database that health care providers can access nationwide to flag patients seeking out numerous opioid prescriptions.
6) It calls for making it easier to invoke the mandatory minimum sentence for drug traffickers who knowingly distribute illegal opioids that can be lethal, like fentanyl.
7) It also proposes a new Justice Department task force known as “Prescription Interdiction and Litigation,” or PIL, which would be empowered to step up prosecutions of criminally negligent doctors, pharmacies and other providers.
8) The White House is also backing new health ideas, such as calling for 75 percent of opioid prescriptions reimbursed by government health programs like Medicare and Medicaid to be issued by using “best practices” within three years. That would be scaled up to 95 percent of prescriptions in five years.
9) It calls on Congress to formally repeal a rule barring Medicaid payment to residential treatment for opioid addiction at large facilities, which could cost tens of billions of dollars. The rule, implemented about 50 years ago, was meant to discourage mass institutionalization of people with mental illness, but states say it has been a barrier to addiction treatment. Some states under the Obama and Trump administrations have received federal permission to waive the rule for substance abuse treatment.
10) The plan also includes measures favored by progressive drug policy reformers like changing the nation's prison system so all federal inmates would be screened for opioid use upon arrival and steered toward treatment at residential re-entry centers as necessary.
11) It also calls for improving tracking systems to rapidly steer resources to areas struggling with the opioid epidemic.

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