A few weeks ago, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office announced that it had reached a settlement worth $720 million from drug companies that manufactured pills contributing to the opioid epidemic in Texas.
This is not the first time Texas has announced such a settlement.
Over the past few years, the state has secured more than $3 billion in settlements related to the opioid crisis. But where’s that money going?
Josh Archote covers community health for the San Antonio Report and he’s been looking more closely at that question. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Well, let me just ask you, where is that money going? I thought that it was supposed to be funneled for, what, addiction recovery? Something along those lines?
Josh Archote: Yes, most of that money has to be used for addiction recovery services and programs. University Health, Bexar County’s public hospital system, has received a little over $30 million of that money so far.
That sounds like a sizable amount. How is it being used more specifically? When we’re talking about addiction recovery services, what does that mean in Bexar County?
Most of it, about $25 million, was secured through a grant from the Texas Opioid Abatement Fund.
University Health is using that money to distribute naloxone, more commonly known under the brand name Narcan. They’re giving out the medication to clinics all across Texas and training on how to use it to save people’s lives from opioid overdoses.
You report one of the things public health officials in Bexar County are trying to address is something called neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). What is that and how big of an issue is it in Bexar County?
The remaining $5.6 million is going toward two areas. One of them is neonatal abstinence syndrome. The other is going towards Bexar County’s inmate population and providing them access to opioid addiction treatment recovery.
NAS, as it is more commonly referred to, that affects newborns whose mothers used either opioids or other addictive substances during pregnancy. These babies face a lot of different complications and they range in severity depending on which drugs were used and at what time during the pregnancy.
But the condition is costly for hospitals to treat. It often requires a 24/7 monitoring and a team of professionals. And University Health is basically using some of this money to offset those costs.
In Bexar County, he issue of the NAS rate is actually much higher than the rest of the state. Now, take that data with a bit of a grain of salt, because there’s a lot of counties in Texas who don’t report their data, but based on the data we do have, Bexar County has a NAS rate of about 7.7 out of a thousand hospital births are a baby born with NAS. That’s the highest of any other county and it accounts for about 23 percent of all NAS cases in Texas.
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That is remarkable. But as you say, it’s hard to know how that compares with other areas that don’t report those statistics. You mentioned a couple of times here this Texas Opioid Abatement Fund. And I’m not sure many Texans know that this is a thing.
What is this fund and what are the objectives here? Is this for the pot of money from these settlements?
Every state is trying to figure out and set up systems to distribute all the money that they’re receiving.
Texas is receiving a lot of money, and one way they’re trying to ensure that that money is going where it’s supposed to be going and is being spent fairly and efficiently is through this Opioid Abatement Fund Council, which is set up through the State Comptroller’s office. It’s a 14-member council and they meet every month and these are public meetings too, so the public can actually go and attend and watch these meetings online if they want to.
But they are basically tasked with ensuring that the money is being spent, how it is supposed to be spent, and it is being spent in an efficient manner going toward programs that are going to help Texas combat the opioid epidemic.
Is there any way of knowing just how much of that money has been sent around Texas that’s related to these lawsuit settlements? And I’m curious, is there any way of knowing just how effective this fund is at trying to deal with opioid addiction in Texas?
Well, so far we know that Texas has authorized about $80 million in settlement money to 154 different hospital districts. And $100 million to cities and counties across the state. That’s the latest data we have, but this is an ongoing process that’s going to continue throughout the next basically two decades.
Different states are deciding how they’re sending out information about where the money is going exactly, and so that kind of remains to be seen. It’s very complicated, and there’s a lot of different moving parts, and a lot of settlements that still need to be settled and money to be distributed. So it’s an ongoing process.
