There’s nothing that can put a value high enough on the lives that have been lost. Too many Americans have died as a result of the opioid epidemic. But a new study from the Society of Actuaries was able to look at the financial toll. According to their survey, the U.S. economy lost $631 billion in a three-year span. This is only non-medical uses of opioids.
The bulk of this money are the lost earnings those who died from overdoses would’ve made. The next highest determining factor are the health care costs involved. Between the years of 1999 and 2017, the CDC has estimated as many as 702,000 people died from drug overdoses. 400,000 of those counted were from drugs that were prescribed by a doctor.
“While the number of opioid prescriptions peaked in 2011 (at 219 million), the number of drug overdose deaths has continued to climb,” the Society of Actuaries’ Mortality and Longevity Strategic Research Committee reports.
“More than 70,000 Americans died in 2017 from drug overdoses, and opioids are the fastest-growing and the largest drug category involved. Opioid overdose deaths are now the single largest factor slowing the growth in U.S. life expectancy and have led to stagnation or decreases in life expectancy three years in a row for the first time since 1915–1918, when the country was facing World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. By some estimates, the United States may be on track to see an additional 500,000 opioid overdose deaths over the next decade.”
Opioid Abuse Declared a Public Health Emergency
It was in 2018 when the Department of Health and Human Services finally announced that we were in the middle of a public health emergency. At the time, nearly 130 people were dying each day from opioid drug overdoses. Now, the problem only seems to be accelerating. It was one of the areas President Trump promised to tackle once he won the presidency.
Still, the cost of the opioid epidemic is likely to hit between $171 billion and $214 billion in 2019 alone.
“The nature and scale of the opioid crisis have been in considerable flux in recent years, with synthetic opioids such as fentanyl only recently becoming a dominant driver of the severity of the crisis” the actuaries report in the study. “Provisional estimates from the CDC show opioid overdose deaths plateauing in 2018, but overdose deaths from illicit use of synthetic opioids are still on the rise, and it’s not yet clear whether overdose deaths are likely to be higher or lower in 2019. As such, timely estimates are key for understanding the economic costs of the crisis as it is currently manifesting.”
“Opioid overdose deaths are now the single largest factor slowing the growth in U.S. life expectancy and have led to stagnation or decreases in life expectancy three years in a row for the first time since 1915–1918, when the country was facing World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic.”
