Now we all know that no one can deny that marijuana is a drug(according to federal regulation), but when used correctly it can also be a medicine. In the 28 states that have legalized medicinal marijuana over the last decade something amazing has happened, people who are on Medicaid filed for less prescriptions in those legal states. According to a new study, If medical marijuana were legalized in all 50 states, Americans could save more than a billion dollars in Medicaid costs.
It’s no big secret that cannabis can be utilized for many ailments that are associated with serious diseases like chronic pain and cancer. ( two different ailments which would require a cocktail of big-pharma medicine to treat)
seeking to enumerate the extent that marijuana, CBD oil and other marijuana-based items replace pharmaceutical medicines, researchers from Health affairs examined prescription data from Medicaid programs between 2007 and 2014. And in more than half of the clinical categories studied, the researchers found that fewer prescriptions were filled where cannabis was available.
The study found “a 13 percent reduction for drugs used to treat depression, a 17 percent reduction for those used to treat nausea, 12 percent reductions for those used to treat psychosis and those used to treat seizure disorders, and an 11 percent reduction for drugs used to treat pain.”
“If all states had had a medical marijuana law in 2014, we estimated that total savings for fee-for-service Medicaid could have been $1.01 billion,” wrote the authors. “Our findings suggest that patients and physicians in the community are reacting to the availability of medical marijuana as if it were medicine.”
Obviously, this study only looks at data from health-care programs that include the country’s low-income healthcare program, Medicaid. Roughly 20 percent of Americans are currently on a form of Medicaid, which suggests that the annual savings in prescription drugs would be several billions more.
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