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Is Healthcare finally scraping the bottom? I remember a time, pre obamacare, when I could afford full coverage for myself and my daughter. But that is a distant memory. And now I limp along with the best I can afford, which isn’t much. You see I’m neither poverty stricken nor an illegal immigrant, so I am not privileged enough to have full healthcare. Or maybe I am viewed as too privileged because of my supposed income and the fact that I am descended from Americans that got here 400 years ago and 400 years later I’m struggling to make ends meet as prices climb in every direction.

And wow those illegal aliens had it good. A 2024 report from the Congressional Budget Office estimated that between 2017 and 2023, Emergency Medicaid spending for undocumented immigrants reached approximately $27 billion, averaging about $4 billion annually. And the Obamacare recipients can schedule a specialist if something doesn’t feel or look right. The rest of us are lucky to get a doctors well check visit twice a year.

Yet, even before Obama did his Saul Alinskyite duty to dismantle our once, previously semi functioning healthcare system, twisting it into a cruel balloon animal wearing a pair of cruel shoes in the back of an Ambulance it can’t afford.

Even before all of that, the issue of Americans with chronic pain losing access to their opiate medications became a complex and multifaceted problem, that had become rooted in a combination of historical, medical, regulatory, and societal factors. The silent war on chronic pain sufferers, at its core, reflects a pendulum swing in public health policy, from liberal prescribing practices that fueled the opioid crisis to stringent restrictions aimed at curbing addiction and overdose deaths. A bunch of bad apples ruined it for the people that truly needed it.

This shift has had profound consequences for chronic pain patients, many of whom rely on opiates for functional quality of life. Many of whom are now suffering in silence and gathering on Redditt and other platforms to scramble to find alternatives for the unrelenting pain that they had already been enduring and managing with the help of opiates.

The OxyContin crisis, which began in the late 1990s, serves as the critical starting point for understanding the downward spiral into the current predicament. Personally, I had lived in Eastern Kentucky for a period of time in the late 1990s. I saw the epidemic with my own eyes. It was so rampant, that I remember that the grocery store I frequented in West Liberty, Kentucky had pulled a bunch of their shopping carts after several people had been unwittingly drugged by the powdery residue left on the cart’s handles. One woman even died.