The number of Americans dying from an opioid overdose soared during the Covid pandemic. One theory for how to bring those numbers down? Better data. A recent multi-year study from the National Institutes of Health tried to find out if county health departments could make progress against America’s horrifying opioid epidemic if they had much more robust data, with mixed results. On the show today, POLITICO healthcare reporter Ruth Reader talks with Steven Overly about the findings in the NIH study.

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