Thanks to the President’s leadership and funding he secured from Congress, we are truly headed in the right direction for the first time since this crisis arose.
As Prepared for Delivery
Thank you all for joining us on this call.
I’m going to begin by laying out what HHS is announcing today and how it fits into our work on the opioid crisis, and then Kellyanne [Conway] will offer some perspective on how this fits into work elsewhere across the administration and at the White House.
Today, we’re announcing that the Trump Administration, through HHS, is giving $1.8 billion in funding to continue helping local communities combat our country’s opioid crisis.
Thanks to the President’s leadership and funding he secured from Congress, we are truly headed in the right direction for the first time since this crisis arose. From 2017 to 2018, we saw a 5 percent decrease in provisional drug overdose death counts—the first decline in two decades.
But we know we have more work to do: More Americans still need treatment, more Americans need support in entering recovery, and more needs to be done to prevent Americans from becoming addicted in the first place. Today’s announcement is part of our commitment to continuing the fight.
Today, we’re announcing two significant sets of grant awards. First, SAMHSA is awarding $932 million in State Opioid Response grants, to all 50 states and several territories. This is the second year of these grants, made possible by funding secured by President Trump from Congress in 2018.
These grants provide flexible funding for state governments to support prevention, treatment, and recovery services in ways that meet the needs of their states. That can mean everything from expanding the use of medication-assisted treatment in criminal justice settings or in rural areas via telemedicine to youth-focused, community-based prevention efforts, recovery supports like employment coaching, and support for the distribution of naloxone. Different states have different needs and different resources of their own; the structure of these grants recognize that.
Starting with the initial grants last year, however, we did impose one requirement: that treatment providers funded by these grants must make available medication-assisted treatment, which is the gold standard of treatment for opioid addiction. I made it clear from my first day here at HHS that our work combating the opioid crisis had to follow the best science possible, and our commitment to MAT is an essential piece of that.
The second set of grants today are under CDC’s Overdose Data to Action grant program. $900 million will be awarded over three years, with $301 million released now for year one, going to 47 states, Washington, D.C., 16 localities, and two territories.
These grants help state and local governments track overdose data in a timely and comprehensive way, and support the development of strategies to help Americans who’ve suffered an overdose get connected to treatment.
Over the past two years, under President Trump, CDC has dramatically sped up its data reporting—when the President took office, overdose data nationally was only published with a 12-month lag. With the help of better reporting from local health departments, we’ve got that down to 6 months now.
That’s just one example of the results we’ve seen under this President. A year and a half ago, I joined him in Manchester, New Hampshire, to launch his opioid initiative. He called for action—and that’s what we’ve delivered.
The President said we would “prevent addiction by addressing the problem of overprescribing.” Since the President took office, the total amount of opioids prescribed is now down 31 percent.
The President said we would “mak[e] medically assisted treatment more available and affordable.”
Our estimates suggest that, in 2016, 921,000 Americans were receiving medication-assisted treatment, the gold standard for treating opioid addiction. In 2019, our estimates suggest we have 1.27 million Americans receiving this treatment—a 38 percent increase.
The President said, “We’re going to make sure our first responders have access to lifesaving overdose-reversing drugs.” Since he took office, naloxone prescriptions have risen 378 percent.
When the President asked HHS to declare a public health emergency back in 2017, he promised that we’d see more approvals of waivers to help “unlock treatment for people in need.” They’d come “very very fast,” he said—and since he took office, we’ve approved 21 states’ waivers, compared with four under the previous administration.
So we at HHS have delivered what the President called for—and so has the rest of the administration. To cover work elsewhere, I now want to hand things over to Kellyanne.
