I was listening to a report about the growing prescription drug addictions and I found myself researching the problem. I was curious about how we are able to fill the demand for this newest wave of growing addictions. Are drug dealers actually waiting in line at the doctors office for a prescription? There has to be a black market that allows these drugs to hit the street in a way other than waiting in a doctors office for a prescription? Research will tell you that the street meds could be poor quality knock offs of common prescription drugs produced by black market sources. The conspiracy theorist in me says that may only be part of the real story.
Fast forward to 2014 and the scene that appeared muddled has become way too clear a picture.
A significant benefit of the Affordable Care Act may be the fact that it is now accessible to the people who could hardly afford it. Several of them will be forced to cash in on the benefits soon. As it turns out, the ACA has several cost saving measures, and the individual mandate is simply one of them. Part of the health reform initiative has involved the systematic attack upon wasteful spending, especially federally funded spending such as medicare and medicaid.
Not many people realize that one of the largest contributors to the rate of healthcare inflation has always been the impact of governmental extortion in healthcare. In the past, billing guru's found ways to over bill medicare and medicaid for procedures that traditional insurance companies would pick and choose who to cover, or not. Over time, all healthcare inflation took on a trajectory that the bilking of medicaid and medicare caused.
Several years ago, healthcare took a blow as federal mandates forced the hand of doctors who take medicaid by only paying set amounts for certain procedures. This has forced many hospitals and doctors to rethink their acceptance of medicaid, but it has also forced the industry to reverse a trend that had several decades of momentum. During the Obama administration, healthcare cost have risen at the lowest rate in decades, due in large part to the crackdown in medicaid billing.
The healthcare crackdown didn't stop there however. In addition to the reduced payment procedure's, Obama had to instruct federal officials to begin tightening the noose on doctors who freely write prescriptions for patients. Especially those addicted to oxycodone. What I had not realized several years ago when I first wrote about the prescription drug epidemic was that doctors were in fact the pushers that made this epidemic expand.
So, what happens to an Oxy addict when the doctor who use to hook them up is under federal pressure to cut that crap out? Enter the return of the dragon. No, this is not a Bruce Lee sequel but a return of massive use of oxycodone's cheap alternative, heroine.
Heroine addictions are massively on the rise, and without another plausible explanation it appears that ObamaCare is the indirect cause of it all. Not to be excluded are all of the doctors who were the original enablers to this problem, but they now have their hands full with the rise in heroine overdoses as a result of another shocking element to this story.
As if increased heroine addictions were not bad enough, today's heroine is not your garden variety heroine. Apparently, today's heroine is likely to be laced with a synthetic opiate called fentanyl which is commonly used in operating room sedation only. How this drug made its way to the black market has brought question and concern to doctors and state officials dealing with the rising overdose trends related to laced heroine.
Absent some serious intervention, this problem is likely to get worse before it gets better because our drug enforcement efforts are sorely lacking sufficient education and prevention. Primarily, we put most of our counter efforts on incarceration and law enforcement, both legitimate industries that our economy depends on as well.
Sadly, while we think we are profiting from the direct and indirect revenue that addictions create, all that we have to show for it is a circle of money that sustains the status quo. The crook steals the money to feed their addiction while their addiction funds the doctors who treats them for a day or the jailer who locks them up for a week. When they hit the street, the cycle begins again.
