As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept across our country and claimed more than 100,000 lives in a few short months, the opioid epidemic, which dates back to at least the early 2000s, has received less attention. But the toll of the opioid crisis in the United States remains enormous by any measure.
Recent data show a small decline in opioid-related mortality following a decade during which opioid-related mortality more than doubled to nearly 53,000 in 2018. However, the aggregate statistics mask important spatial and temporal trends in the data. This report estimates nationwide, regional, and county-level economic costs associated with the opioid crisis.
Nursing homes have borne the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic, but recently released data show that the severity of outbreaks in these facilities has varied substantially across the United States. Some have argued that policy decisions have driven the variation in outcomes observed in nursing homes, while a competing theory is that nursing home outbreaks largely mirror the surrounding area.
Last October, a new controversy erupted over the progressivity of the American tax system. The brouhaha was prompted by a new book, The Triumph of Injustice, by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. In it, the authors claim that the highest-earning Americans’ tax rate has fallen below everyone else’s.
A large share of total COVID-19 deaths in the United States have occurred in nursing homes, prompting the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to begin reporting facility-level data on COVID-19 rates at nursing homes.
