YET ANOTHER VALID MEASURE OF A WORSENING OPIOID CRISIS: DIAGNOSED CASES SURGE, WHILE AMERICA’S MEDIA/MEDICAL COLLUSION CELEBRATES FABRICATED GAINS
The most-likely-to-be-ignored report appears immune to dismissal as invalid, actually means what it appears to mean
by Clark Miller
Published October 24, 2025
As reported by Axios –
Diagnoses of opioid use disorder among the commercially insured jumped nearly 40% nationwide between 2021 and 2024, according to data from FAIR Health’s Opioid Tracker shared first with Axios.
That cases “jumped” seems a bit dramatic for the persistent increases over those years.
It’s important to note that the data reflect changes in OUD diagnoses for individuals covered by commercial insurance, and occurring over years that pandemic-years Medicaid expansion had peaked then was “unwinding“.
It can be reasonably hypothesized that, rather than the increases in diagnoses representing a higher incidence of the condition of concern in an ongoing epidemic, beginning around mid-2023, Medicaid recipients losing benefits and access by lost enrollment gained commercial insurance coverage, so that the trend does NOT represent worsening incidence over that period.
And it is more reasonable to dismiss that possibility as exceedingly unlikely, lacking compelling evidence that those individuals would have had the resources to gain commercial insurance in numbers that can account for the trend in diagnoses.
State-by-state Medicaid enrollment expansion, and the potential for unwinding to contribute to surges in OUD diagnoses tied to shifts to commercial insurance, does not correspond well with the incidence of OUD diagnoses in 2024, or with the top states for gains in incidence: Tennessee, West Virginia, Delaware, Arkansas, and Kentucky, those states a mixed collection accross a spectrum of low to moderately high enrollment expansion.
The top graphic portrays magnitude of Medicaid expansion enrollment by state.
What appears to be entirely likely – compellingly likely lacking evidence to support that the persistently surging incidence of Americans accessing services to be diagnosed and treated for problem opioid use is not just what it appears to be – is that in fact the trend actually represents increasing incidence of problem opioid abuse in the U.S. through 2024, that is, increasing prevalence of high-risk opioid use = gold standard treatment failure.
That overt likelihood is consistent with all other valid measures of severity and worsening course of the epidemic, including nonfatal overdose, incidence of opioid injection-related infectious disease, workplace random drug screens, and the necessity of desperate, intensive naloxone campaigns as harm reduction against failed, lethal gold standard medical treatment.
Failed, fake lethal treatments inflicted by impaired experts, validated and celebrated by useful idiots.
