Senate health bill includes only $2 billion for opioid crisis,

The U.S. Senate’s health care bill contains $2 billion to help fight the opioid crisis gripping the nation, far less than some Republican senators had initially hoped.

The bill lists an appropriation of $2 billion for fiscal year 2018 to provide grants to states for support, treatment and recovery services for people with mental or substance abuse disorders.

That amount would fall far short of the reported $45 billion in support some Republicans senators had sought over 10 years.

The House GOP bill would end the extra funding states get through expanded Medicaid in 2020, and place a limit on overall federal spending for the program in the future. Recipients who continue to meet eligibility requirements would be grandfathered in.

But the Senate bill contains a single mention of the crisis and does not reference continuing funds beyond the $2 billion for fiscal year 2018.

In Tennessee, the opioid crisis has hit hard.

A report released earlier this year detailed a surge of deaths between 2012 and 2015. In 2015, at least 1,451 Tennesseans died from drug overdoses.

That’s 22 drug overdose deaths for every 100,000 Tennesseans.

Chris Carroll, a spokesman for Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., said Wednesday many were kept in the dark over the Republican health care bill, with no hearings with opportunities for doctors, nurses, hospitals or patients to comment.

“The House bill would drop 23 million people from coverage, including hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans,” Carroll said. “Cutting opioid abuse treatment would only worsen a terrible epidemic. It’s also the opposite of the reforms that President Trump promised during his campaign.”

According to data compiled by The Associated Press, the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion to address the crisis accounted for 61 percent of total Medicaid spending on substance abuse treatment in Kentucky, 47 percent in West Virginia, 56 percent in Michigan, 59 percent in Maryland, and 31 percent in Rhode Island.

In Ohio, the expansion accounted for 43 percent of Medicaid spending in 2016 on behavioral health, a category that includes mental health and substance abuse.

Tennessee did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

Those states that accepted the Medicaid expansion funds represent a cross-section of places hardest hit by the nation’s drug-overdose epidemic, which claimed more than 52,000 lives in 2015.

Of the deaths, more than six in 10 were due to opioids, from prescription pain relievers like oxycodone to street drugs like heroin and an elephant tranquilizer, The Associated Press reported.

At a recent budget hearing, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price defended the Trump administration and raised questions about how much difference Medicaid actually makes.

The HHS budget for the opioid crisis is more than three times as great as two years ago, $811 million versus $245 million, Price said. That reflects increases approved by Congress beyond what Medicaid spends.

The Senate’s 142-page bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act contained a single mention of the opioid crisis on page 133.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.