In the News

Last night my family and I were watching the evening news as we regularly do. One report came from Akron, Ohio, where opioid overdoses have reached crisis proportions. We learned that at one of Akron's addiction-treatment facilities, patients receive monthly injections of Vivitrol, a drug that may be helpful in getting addicts off drugs. One injection of Vivitrol costs $1,200 and lasts four weeks. Then the reporter told us that this facility treats 2,500 opioid patients monthly, all with Vivitrol and presumably a host of other services. The treatment is free to the patients, because they are all on Medicaid.

My 15-year-old, smart cookie that she is, flagged me to hit "pause." (Like the rest of America, we don't watch anything live. And the pause button is especially handy for family conversations about the evening news.) "Nothing's free. Who's paying for all those shots?" she asked, knowing full well the answer. My son got a calculator. $1,200 per shot for 2,500 people. That's monthly, so multiply by 12. Medicaid pays for $36,000,000 worth of Vivitrol a year at one facility in one town in one state. Thirty-six million dollars for a drug that has a questionable rate of effectiveness. From what I read online, after six months, close to 50 percent of Vivitrol users (not necessarily at this facility, but in general) have returned to opiod use.

The angle of the story was that all these people, 2,500 of them, would not be able to receive this treatment if changes are made to Medicaid, as is proposed under the Republican's new health care plan. One of the residents at the facility said that if the plan goes through, Congress will have a lot of innocent blood on their hands. Just to make this point clearer, the report ended with a shot of a mobile morgue, a big white truck used to haul off the bodies of all those who have died from their addiction. If we were hoping for the reporter to acknowledge what a huge amount of money that was, to give us some statistics about the program's success, or to remind viewers that the national debt is now $19,846,080,045,627, we were disappointed. None of that came up. Just the mobile morgue and the threat of "innocent blood."

Back to my daughter and her question. In a few months, she'll be 16, and she's eager to get a job. So the answer is, "In a few months, Addison, you'll be paying for those shots." So will my elderly friend who worked hard his whole life to "pay into the system" so that Medicaid would be there for him, unaware that the system would be faltering partially due to a drain from drug addicts in the prime of their lives. It will be paid for by the families I know who carefully, strategically live on one income so that mom can give focused attention to their kids, praying they won't get sick or injured because their crappy, overpriced insurance covers next to nothing. It will be paid for by the families who have to choose between covering the mortgage payment or filling their kids' cavities. It will also be paid for by the LeBron Jameses and the Beyonces and the Bill Gateses, but there aren't very many of them.

I rarely step into political waters on this blog. But I feel the tension of this issue, and I feel it even more when my kids start to wrestle with it. When I think of the debt they are inheriting.

I am not at all unsympathetic to the addicted. I don't believe they intentionally chose this path for their lives or that they should be kicked to the curb to figure out a solution for themselves. They are hurting people who were most likely raised by other hurting people. Most of them do not have the advantages my children have: married parents who love them unconditionally, a consistent roof over their heads, a good education, reliability, stability, and on and on. I get that. I care about that, and I care about justice and mercy. My point is not to question the ethics of caring for the addicted, but to question the methods and sustainability of it.

Our world is not getting any nicer or easier. I wonder if the number of wounded-beyond-functioning people will some day out number those who can support them? I wonder about the inconsistencies of throwing billions of federal dollars at a drug-addiction crisis while legalizing marijuana all across the country. I wonder about treating drugs with other drugs, especially those that cost $1,200 a shot and have a 50 percent chance of working. I wonder how a country that's growing more secular by the day will realize that the problem is not drug addiction but hopelessness, and that Jesus is the only solution.

Just another night watching the evening news and trying to help my kids make sense of the world. God, give us wisdom.