You probably associate methadone with heroin recovery clinics. Now it’s associated with state-run medicine. And iatrogenic fatalities.
Washington State’s “Washington Rx” is a medical assistance program that’s been in operation less than a decade, providing a drug discount card to those with low incomes and regulating prescriptions for Medicaid patients. The biggest challenge? Rising prescription drug prices — which places many drugs out of reach of poor and non-insured folks, and jeopardizes state finances with a financial hole to suck up ever-increasing amounts of money.
How to economize?
The board responsible for Washington Rx policy has pushed cheaper drugs. For pain medication, effective but expensive drugs like Oxycodone were swapped out for that old synthetic opioid, methadone, which is ultra-cheap. This saved the state millions.
Reasonable, eh?
Well, the problem with methadone is that it’s hard to control dose. The drug lingers in the body, builds up. It turns out to be rather easy to pass away during sleep of an accidental overdose. “Doctors,” a fascinating Seattle Times report informs us, “call it the silent death.”
Methadone overdose rates have radically increased in the Evergreen State, especially in poorer communities. Since Washington Rx set up shop, 2,173 Washingtonians have died of methadone overdose; an overwhelming majority of all overdose cases are from this one drug.
Programs in other states also list methadone as a preferred drug, and methadone overdoses are on the rise nationwide.
We are often told of the horrors of private insurers and their dastardly cost-cutting practices. But here’s a bureaucracy cutting costs. And effectively, too.
With a side-effect: killing people.
That’s hardly Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
4 replies on “Killing Them Softly”
You nailed it, Sir, and this is such a major problem that many of the private hospitals here in Georgia have removed it from their formulary because the risk of delayed death is so great. In the meantime, private clinics that treat chonic pain with methadone require that the patients show up every day to get that single day’s dose. The analgesic effect may be less than 8 hours while the half life of the drug in the body can be 10 to 100 times that. An effective dose for one person may end up being 6 – 700 mg a day to someone that is tolerant, where 30mg may end up being fatal to someone that is not.
So much more dignity dying because of the Medical Assistance Board’s policy that because of Obamacare’s death panels.
http://delendam.wordpress.com
And marijuana is illegal. Really? Sick.
I just read an article that said marijuana is very effective for pain relief and showed huge promise to help those addicted to heroin kick the habit.
Wow.
Why can’t we just get government out of the health care busybodyness?
Government must forcibly take money from people to do this. Shouldn’t we leave health care to the free market? Most of the increasing prices for medicine, and health care, is a direct result of government corruption of the free market in health care. At least, much less force would be used to dealing with our medical needs. And a world with less of use force would be much better.
America’s the freest country on earth, and you can –love it or leave it– die a slow death of ignorance+cancer, because your government school teachers never told you you need to be curious and brave to live, or that living might mean finding a cancer cure banned by the AMA and FDA. Oh, and by the way, watch your family die too, because ignorance and death aren’t limited to your dumb servile ass. Sugar or Stevia? Chemotherapy or B17? Prohibition or Property Rights? Death or Life? Most slaves are too dumb and incurious to choose the obvious answers.
So, they should get everything they deserve, with absolutely no waiting. Why make them wait? That will only allow them to impose their ignorant choice on you.
Strike now, while you’re strong. Hesitation is death, and indecision invites aggression.
The very least you could do is make sure that if you’re called for jury duty, you show up, tell the prosecutor what he wants to hear, get seated, and vote “not guilty” if it’s a victimless crime. The very least you could do is vote Ron Paul in the Republican primary, and the general if he wins it. These two prior things are the easy “give me” choices.
Beyond that, do what your enlightened soul compels you to do, and remember that the Founding Fathers of the USA chose to gun down soldiers, bureaucrats, and British loyalists in their tracks rather than live as tax-slaves. If you can’t even command loyalty to liberty from your own family, you might as well give up. But if you do give up, I encourage you to take a few of the collectivist bastards with you. After all, they’re the reason things haven’t been a lot nicer for you, here on Earth. And if things were nicer for you, you’d never have reached such a dark conclusion.
Without the FDA, AMA, IRS, and every other government parasite, we’d all be living unbounded lifespans, instead of shuddering to ourselves when we read that our elderly are being murdered by insane government bureaucrats and their idiotic dictates.
Are we men, or are we mice?