Committee discusses bill to extend Medicaid coverage to inmates prior to release Emily Boerger | Apr 16, 2021
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The House Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee discussed the Medicaid Reentry Act of 2021 during a hearing on substance misuse and the opioid epidemic on Wednesday. The bill, which is sponsored by Congressman Paul Tonko, would allow states to make Medicaid coverage available for incarcerated individuals up to 30 days prior to release.
Current law doesn’t allow incarcerated individuals to enroll in Medicaid until after being released.
In a letter to Tonko and other members of Congress, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) reasoned that allowing coverage prior to release would help connect individuals to care and would reduce recidivism.
Coca and cocaine are on the mind of the Colombian government this week. (Pixabay)
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Lawmakers on Wednesday discussed ways to remove barriers to accessing treatment for substance use disorder during a hearing of the Health Subcommittee for the Committee on Energy and Commerce.
From eliminating the training requirements for buprenorphine prescribing, to take-home doses of methadone, there was no shortage of ideas, albeit controversial ones.
The subcommittee also examined the two-track response to dealing with opioids that seems to diverge based on race and ZIP code.
Subcommittee Chair Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) explained that the need to resolve access and equity issues could not be more urgent, noting that overdose deaths spiked after the start of the pandemic, and culminated in over 88,000 deaths in the 12 months leading up to August 2020 making last year the deadliest year for overdoses on record.
As the American opioid crisis reaches near epidemic levels, law enforcement agencies across the country are training their officers how to use Narcan to revive people who have overdosed. The LA County Sheriff’s Department has deployed over 600 deputies with Narcan and is changing the way law enforcement approaches the opioid crisis. China Nov 8, 2017
A Queens man and a New Jersey woman have been arrested for allegedly conspiring to distribute dangerous designer drugs, including a synthetic opioid several times more potent than morphine that has been blamed for at least one overdose death, authorities said Tuesday. NBC Jan 9, 2017
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said Thursday it will not call for reclassifying marijuana, NBC News reports. In a notice for the Federal Register, the DEA proposed to leave marijuana in the most restrictive federal category: Schedule I, which also includes heroin, LSD, and ecstasy. But the agency said it wo
As the COVID-19 pandemic killed more than a half-million Americans, it also quietly inflamed what already was one of the country’s greatest public health crises: drug addiction.