Medicaid serves a key role in helping opioid addicts get the treatment they need, a new study says. Prescription rates for the anti-opioid medication buprenorphine increased more than 27% in states that expanded Medicaid between 2018 and 2024, researchers reported in the September issue of the journal Health Affairs. By comparison, buprenorphine prescriptions fell 2% among states that didn’t expand Medicaid, researchers found.
“We were impressed by the success stories in some states, such as those with recent eligibility expansions,” said lead researcher Stephen Crystal, director of the Rutgers Center for Health Services Research at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research in Brunswick, N.J. “Several of these states, like Virginia, Utah and Missouri, doubled or tripled Medicaid-paid prescribing, driving strong population-level improvement,” Crystal noted in a news release.
More than 80,000 people in the U.S. died in 2024 from opioid overdoses, even though medications like buprenorphine have been proven effective in treating addiction, researchers said in background notes. The federal government declared an opioid public health emergency in 2017 and again in 2025, and multiple federal policy changes have been implemented to make it easier for people to get access to buprenorphine, researchers said. To read the full story.