Pubdate: Wed, 11 Jan 2017
Source: Herald News (West Paterson, NJ)
Copyright: 2017 North Jersey Media Group Inc.
Contact:  http://www.northjersey.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2911

CHRISTIE HOPES MORE ADDICTS WILL GET TREATMENT UNDER TRUMP

[photo] Governor Chris Christie holds a baby boy facing perinatal
addiction while the boy's grandmother looks on while he was touring the
Jersey Shore Medical Center's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) in
Neptune, N.J. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016. The baby boy is 49 days old and
suffers from withdrawal symptoms transferred from his mother who had
addiction issues. (Photo: Tim Larsen/Governor's office)

With changes to health care among the top priorities for President-elect
Donald Trump when he takes office next month, New Jersey is likely to gain
greater flexibility in Medicaid and possibly help drug users get access to
treatment, Gov. Chris Christie said Wednesday.

During a visit to the Carrier Clinic, a treatment center in Belle Mead,
Christie said he has "spoken a lot to the president-elect" about issues
with Medicaid, the federal health care program for poor and struggling
Americans. One of the directors at the clinic, Steve Drzewoszewski, told
Christie during a roughly hourlong roundtable discussion that a major
barrier to treatment for those seeking it is the high cost of insurance
deductibles and the services falling outside the scope of Medicaid
coverage.

"That's why you see fewer and fewer facilities and more and more demand,"
he said.

Christie said that he thinks there is an "imbalance" and that he expects
Trump, who has promised to alter President Barack Obama's signature health
care law, to follow through within a year or two to give states the power
to decide what services are covered.

"I think he is going to, fairly quickly, make changes to the Medicaid
program that gives much greater flexibility to the governors to decide
what type of treatment, what type of exceptions, what type of requirements
are particularly a need for your state," Christie said. "We're going to be
taking a whole new look at Medicaid and how we operate it."

Christie has been a longtime advocate of treatment for drug addiction and
has been widely praised for his initiatives to battle abuse, particularly
of heroin and opiates. But despite a range of policies intended to help
addicts, access to care is still a barrier and opiate deaths continue to
plague the state.

As Christie sat with more than a dozen people at the clinic, his
administration announced that deaths linked to the powerful opiate
fentanyl -- now commonly laced into heroin sold on the street or sold as a
stand-in for it -- have nearly tripled. There were 414 fentanyl-related
deaths in 2015, compared with 142 in 2014, the Attorney General's Office
said. Fatal drug overdoses, largely because of opioids, increased in that
period from 1,304 to 1,587, the office said.

Last month, Attorney General Christopher Porrino signed an emergency
order, to last 270 days, adding fentanyl "knockoffs" to the list of
Schedule I controlled dangerous substances, subjecting them to the
strongest state control and penalties for possession, manufacture or use.

More broadly, what's necessary to stem the deaths and abuse of opiates,
Christie said, is shifting the national conversation on drug addiction to
regard it as something akin to cancer and heart disease rather than a
stigma.
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