Trump AWOL on opioid proposal
T alk about irony.
Last week U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy offered an amendment to the Opioid Crisis Response Act, a policy recommended by the commission President Donald Trump formed to produce ideas for dealing with the crisis. It also had the backing of U.S. Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, a Trump appointee.
And the amendment would cost nothing. Instead, it had the potential to raise revenues.
Yet, one by one, the Connecticut Democrat watched as the Republican members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted no. Moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a state which, like Connecticut, has seen a dramatic increase in overdose deaths, wouldn’t budge from the party line, nor would Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., whose state includes an Appalachian region that has been called ground zero for the health emergency.
The amendment failed in the committee with 11 Democrats in favor, 12 Republicans opposed.
The Trump administration had made no effort to lobby Republicans about the policy backed by the president’s own blue ribbon commission or to expand on the testimony of his labor secretary as to why a policy change is necessary.
“It just speaks to the dysfunction of this town right now, given the fact that it is a progressive Democrat who has to carry the water on the president’s opioid recommendations,” Murphy told me later when I interviewed him about the vote.
The amendment would have given the Department of Labor some teeth when it came to enforcing a law on the books that requires insurers to provide coverage parity for mental illness issues, including addiction, recognizing it is a medical matter the same as physical health problems.
The President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, chaired by Trump’s pal Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, concluded better enforcement tools, in the form of civil monetary penalties, were necessary to get the attention of insurance companies when it came to adhering to the law’s intent.
Just a couple of weeks earlier, Trump’s labor secretary, Acosta, had testified about the topic in front of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee.
“I just wanted to ask you to comment on why you think these new capacities, these new authorities, are important to make sure that the industry is compliant with mental health parity laws,” Murphy asked Acosta at that hearing.
“We do not have penalty assessment authority,” Acosta said, adding, “As a general matter, the presence of a civil penalty tends to focus attention more than the absence of a civil penalty.”
But Senate Republicans on Health, Education and Labor didn’t get the message and defaulted to the party’s standard position — regulating and enforcing penalties against business is bad.
“The president is totally AWOL from these discussions,” said a clearly aggravated Murphy. “He set up this commission and then he checked out. It was left to me, a critic of the president, to try to get his own commission’s recommen-
dations in the opioid bill. The president did not get a single Republican vote for one of the primary recommendations in his own commission’s report.”
Lack of access to effective addiction treatment and the inability to pay for it are major problems, so assuring insurance coverage requirements are followed is a big deal.
“My amendment would have been immediately helpful, whereas a lot of the other provisions in the bill rely on future funding. By giving the Department of Labor new powers, they could have started to have an immediate effect on the amount of addiction treatment they were covering,” Murphy said.
By providing only $3.5 billion to address the crisis, Congress is woefully underfunding the effort. About 64,000 people died of drug overdoses in the nation in 2016, and the numbers continue to spike. Connecticut set a depressing record with 1,038 overdose deaths last year.
Citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Murphy’s office estimated the opioid crisis cost Connecticut $10 billion in 2016, putting that $3.5 billion national investment in stark perspective.
“I find it so offensive that we’re giving tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks this year to big banks and international corporations and we can only find three and a half billion dollars to fight an epidemic that is taking a thousand lives a year in our little state,” Murphy said. “I think our priorities are totally screwed up. This Congress is prioritizing tax cuts for the very, very wealthy over the life and death of people struggling with addiction.”
It’s the truth. Paul Choiniere is the editorial page editor.