Dems introduce legislation to provide $10B annually to fight opioids

In the latest move to combat the opioid crisis, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-MD, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, are introducing legislation that would require $10 billion a year in federal funding to take on the plague of overdoses ravaging the country.

The Baltimore Sun reports that the legislation is modeled after the Ryan White Act, passed in 1990, which provided billions in federal money to combat the AIDS crisis. It would provide federal assistance directly to local and state governments to provide treatment services.

Cummings and Warren say that the opioid epidemic has to be tackled like previous medical crises—AIDS among them. More than 64,000 Americans died in 2016 from drug overdoses, about two thirds of them attributable to opioids. According to the report, that’s more than the highest death tolls of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, according to the Surgeon General’s office, only about 10 percent of those who need specialty treatment actually get it.

Related: Employers spend $2.6 billion annually on care for opioid addiction

The Comprehensive Addiction Resources Emergency Act, or CARE Act, would tackle that head on by providing $100 billion in federal funding over ten years, the report says, including $4 billion each year to states; $2.7 billion to the hardest hit counties and cities; and $1.8 billion for public health surveillance and biomedical research.

In addition $1 billion per year would be allotted for expanded services; $500 million for greater access to the overdose reversal drug naloxone; $400 million for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and $400 million to train doctors and health workers.

While opioid addiction is often considered a rural problem, rampant in small towns in poorer areas, the truth is that it has hit big cities too. Although the highest overdose rate in 2016 was in West Virginia’s McDowell County, Baltimore lost more than twice as many to drug overdoses as it did to homicide that year—nearly 800; Los Angeles County’s OD death rate was more than 2,200 and in Cook County, Chicago’s home county, nearly 2,000 died.

According to the Council of Economic Advisers, the epidemic costs the American economy more than $500 billion a year—an argument that Cummings believes will weigh against concerns about the proposed program’s cost. While he doesn’t expect the CARE Act to pass this year, he and Warren plan to tour the states hardest hit by the opioid crisis to gain support for the bill; in the report he hopes that once a new Congress is seated there will be movement on the bill.

In the report, Cummings is quoted saying, “We can’t afford to kick this problem down the road any more. Every day we kick it down the road, 115 people will die.”