They can't if they lose Medicaid when ACA is repealed.
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In Kentucky about 11,000 people were receiving addiction treatment through Medicaid by mid-2016, up sharply from 1,500 people in early 2014, according to the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, a health policy research group. In West Virginia, Ms. Rosenberg of the National Council for Behavioral Health said, her group’s member organizations — nonprofit providers of mental health and addiction treatment — are now treating 30,000 people a year, up from 9,000 before the health law.
Here in New Hampshire — which Mr. Trump won resoundingly in the Republican primary and lost by a hair in November — more than 10,000 people have received addiction treatment after gaining coverage through the Medicaid expansion, said Michele Merritt, senior vice president and policy director at New Futures, a nonprofit advocacy group. Small treatment centers throughout the state that had never been able to bill insurance before have started doing so, she said, allowing them to hire more counselors and accept more patients.
“We’re just beginning to implement these exchanges in a way that people know about them,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, referring to the exchanges created under the health law. Getting rid of them, she said, “makes no sense.”
Others note that even with more treatment options, the number of deaths in places like New Hampshire continues to rise. The state ranks first nationwide in per capita overdose deaths from fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that is now killing more people here than heroin. Republicans here have also criticized state health officials for not tracking how many Medicaid enrollees who receive addiction treatment end up relapsing.
