Opioid Epidemic Costing U.S. More Than Medicare And Medicaid Together

Our coverage on the opioid epidemic continues below. Updated 26 July 2017.

Against the backdrop of domestic political infighting and geopolitical concerns, the drug epidemic unfolding in the United States is getting nowhere near enough attention as it deserves.

As covered a few weeks ago, according to the Washington Post, the opioid epidemic has killed an estimated 180,000 people between 2000 to 2015 from overdoses, more than three times the number of Americans who died during the Vietnam War.

The cost of this epidemic is spiraling out of control. Goldman Sachs has estimated that based on recent studies by Birnbaum et al., Rice et al., and Florence et al., the total economic cost of opioid addiction was $78.5 billion for 2013 alone. Since...