Why slashing medicaid and narcan funding will cost lives
How Many More Have to Die?
Narcan Saves Lives
🧠 If You Only Read One Line:
Overdose deaths finally dropped.
Now they’re rising again.
And the very tools that helped us save people?
This administration is cutting them.
There’s this moment, a pause, right after you’ve survived hell and you think maybe the worst is over.
That’s where we were.
After seventeen months of decline, overdose deaths in the U.S. were finally going down.
Families were catching their breath. Harm reduction was finally being treated like public health instead of public shame. Medicaid had opened the door to treatment for millions who never had access.
We had hope.
But hope doesn’t last when policy forgets who’s dying.
🚨 The Latest CDC Data: A Warning We Cannot Ignore
New CDC data shows overdose deaths are up again. About 1,400 more lives lost in the 12 months leading up to January 2025. That spike happened before President Trump returned to office. That’s important.
But what matters more right now is what this administration is doing today:
Slashing Medicaid
Defunding federal Narcan grants
Proposing up to $2.3 trillion in cuts to the exact programs that were working
This isn’t a warning sign. This is someone yanking the fire alarm and the ceiling's already on fire.
💊 Medicaid Wasn’t Optional. It Was the Lifeline.
Nearly 90% of all medical treatment for opioid use disorder in the U.S. is paid for at least in part by Medicaid.
That's not a left-wing talking point.
That's Brookings. That's Stanford. That's truth.
And now it’s under threat.
Cutting Medicaid at this stage of the crisis is like cutting the power lines during a hurricane and then wondering why people drowned in the dark.
If you gut Medicaid, this is what you’re cutting:
Suboxone
Methadone
Detox and rehab stays
Dual-diagnosis mental health care
The very safety net keeping people alive long enough to get better
🚑 And Then There’s Narcan
You know what Narcan doesn’t do?
It doesn’t ask if you’ve got a job.
It doesn’t care who you voted for.
It doesn’t wait for insurance approval.
It just saves your life.
And yet, the grants that put Narcan in the hands of first responders, librarians, bus drivers, and parents like me…those are being defunded too.
You can’t scream “fentanyl crisis” out of one side of your mouth and pull the antidote away with the other.
❌ This Isn’t Political. It’s Personal.
Yes, Trump is in office.
Yes, this administration is proposing these cuts.
And no, I’m not here to tell you how to vote.
But I will tell you this:
The choices being made right now will lead to more lives lost.
You don’t get to talk about saving kids from drugs while cutting the only programs keeping them alive.
You don’t get to call yourself pro-life if you’re willing to let people die of a preventable overdose because they were poor or sick or had the wrong kind of insurance.
🧭 So What Do We Do?
If you’re a mom like me…
If you’ve sat by the phone, praying it doesn’t ring…
If you’ve ever administered Narcan and prayed it worked in time…
You know this already:
We don’t give up. We get louder.
Here’s how:
Speak up—to your reps, your neighbors, your family. Say what matters.
Support what’s working—Narcan, Medicaid, harm reduction, treatment access.
Don’t let silence write the policy. If we stay quiet, they’ll pretend we didn’t care.
❤️ A Final Word
This isn’t just about numbers.
This is about people. This is about your daughter. Your son. Your friend. Yourself.
And if the people in power want to balance the budget on their backs?
We don’t stay silent.
We stand the hell up.
At the bottom of the blog post, link back to the original Substack version with a line like:
This piece originally appeared on Prescribed Chaos on Substack. Republished here for broader access.
