Blinded by the Light? –
June 24, 2019 – The President’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) just released a new report on how to beat back America’s opioid crisis. The CEA highlighted as potential solutions measures like curbing illicit drug trafficking, reducing over-prescribing in doctors’ offices, and cracking down on drug distributors fueling the epidemic for profit. Those are noble goals, to be sure. But the CEA report lacks one crucial element in fighting this crisis: nurse practitioners.
About 72,000 Americans died from a drug overdose last year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over two-thirds of those deaths were from opioids. To put that in perspective, drug overdoses killed almost the same number of Americans last year as car crashes and guns—combined.
