Efforts to combat opioid crisis hasn’t stopped other plans

President Donald Trump signs a bipartisan legislation to confront the opioid crisis in the East Room of the White House on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

addiction.

“What has really worked here is Medicaid expansion,” said Linda Rosenberg, president of the National Council for Behavioral Health. “Yet this administration is continually attacking entitlements because of the deficit. That really concerns us.”

The Trump administration’s health insurance moves come amid some promising signs that the sharp increase in opioid overdose deaths in recent years may be slowing. Preliminary data reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that the number of deaths flattened in late 2017 and early 2018.

At the same time, lawmakers from both parties were at the White House on Wednesday to celebrate a large opioid bill they passed earlier this fall.

But rolling back insurance coverage or weakening rules on health

plans threaten to undercut public health initiatives around the country to boost treatment, according to health care leaders.

“The expansion of Medicaid covered more people, and those people are accessing addiction treatment,” said Dr. Kelly J. Clark, president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. “Prior to that, they simply weren’t able to.”

Clark works in Kentucky, which expanded Medicaid coverage through the 2010 health care law, often called “Obamacare.”

Medicaid expansion has allowed states to extend coverage to millions of previously uninsured working-age adults, many of whom suffer from substance use disorders.

The program is now the largest source of funding for treatment of behavioral health, including substance use disorder.