Underestimated Cost of the Opioid Crisis
2017
This report on the opioid public health crisis was released by the White House Council on Economic Advisors (CEA) in November 2017. It corrects previous estimates of related costs by adding the value of the associated deaths. Earlier estimates focused on medical and other expenditures, while the new report also includes estimates of the value that individuals place on reducing their own risks of premature mortality.
The report notes that, in 2015, over 33,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses. CEA estimates that in the same year, the economic cost of the opioid crisis was $504.0 billion, or 2.8 percent of GDP that year. This estimate is over six times larger than the most recently estimated costs of the epidemic, due to more comprehensive counts of opioid-related deaths and inclusion of the costs of nonfatal cases, as well as full accounting for the value of fatalities.
Underestimated Cost of the Opioid Crisis
Source:
The Underestimated Cost of the Opioid Crisis. The Council of Economic Advisers 2017; Nov. https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea