Population Data

The danger of that first prescription “Just in case,” the oral surgeon said, as he prescribed the opioid hydrocodone for my 17-year-old son, who just had his wisdom teeth out. “But you might try Motrin first,” he added. Not knowing what the next hours, or days, would bring, we filled the prescription for 20 pills. […]

It seems self-evident: one way to address the epidemic of opioid deaths is to make prescription opioids harder to misuse. OxyContin, for example, is especially dangerous when it is crushed for ingestion, inhalation, or injection. In 2010, the FDA approved a reformulated, abuse-deterrent version of OxyContin that made the pill difficult to crush or dissolve. […]

The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured recently released an issue brief detailing the most costly outpatient drugs to Medicaid in 2014 and the first half of 2015. Using data from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the authors analyzed outpatient drug costs based on Medicaid spending (before rebates) to determine which drugs account […]