Another day, another proposal for Massachusetts Democrat and 2020 presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren.
Warren’s latest involves ambitious legislation to help fight the opioid epidemic while campaigning in West Virginia and Ohio, two states that have been hit hard by the national addiction crisis.
Warren’s bill, the Comprehensive Addiction Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, had been previously released last year. Funding will reportedly be delivered to states, territories, tribal governments and nonprofits based mostly on the severity of crises affecting those areas. The money would support early intervention, addiction treatment, mental health care and housing support.
And Warren of course plans to pay for the program by — stop me if you’ve heard this one — taxing the rich.
Warren also has previously announced her “ultra-millionaire tax,” which would soak the 75,000 richest Americans to the tune of $2.75 trillion in revenue. The revenue would then be used to pay for the CARE Act, as well as Warren’s previously floated universal childcare plan and free public college and student loan debt-cancellation proposals.
“If the CARE Act becomes law, every single person would get the care they need,” Warren wrote in a Medium post. “The nation’s top experts on the crisis stand behind it. It spells out in detailed terms exactly how funding would get to the communities that need it most. We should pass it — not in two years, not after the 2020 elections — but immediately.”
Warren has tried moving her CARE Act bill through Congress previously, where it didn’t get nearly enough support. Only 81 members of the House signed on, and the bill co-sponsors in the Senate.
Overdoses from prescription opioids have killed more than 200,000 Americans the past two decades, according to the Center for Disease Control. About 70,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2017 alone, and about two-thirds of those were opioid related.
