620 - How The Opioid Settlement Tracker Is Monitoring $50 Billion
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2023
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Who is making decisions about how to spend more than $50 billion in proceeds from opioid-related litigation? Christine Minhee, lawyer and founder of opioidsettlementtracker.com, talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about tracking the complex cashflow state by state, and her hopes that the website will challenge more jurisdictions to share just how they're spending dollars intended for tackling the opioid epidemic.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:32.3 | This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. |
| 0:34.7 | Today, Christine Minhe, the founder of Opioid SettlementTracker.com, talks to Dr. Josh |
| 0:40.1 | Jarfstein about how to, as the name states, track the opioid settlements. An estimated |
| 0:46.2 | $50 billion is coming to states and localities in the United States, but how are these funds |
| 0:52.3 | being spent? And how can a member of the public get involved? |
| 0:55.9 | Let's listen. |
| 0:57.6 | Christine Minhee, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call to talk about the opioid |
| 1:03.2 | settlements. Now, it's been a little while since these settlements were first announced. |
| 1:08.5 | For sure. I mean, the big deal was finalized in 2022, |
| 1:13.6 | proposed initially in 2021. And when I started tracking this back in 2019, the Google alerts I had |
| 1:20.8 | set up for the words opioid and settlement were not nearly as voluminous as they are now. |
| 1:26.5 | And just to remind everyone, how much money are we talking about? |
| 1:30.4 | So the official account on my site, OpioidSettlementTracker.com, there's a global settlement |
| 1:35.0 | tracker tab. It lists over $50 billion. Though that number is due to be finalized and |
| 1:42.5 | fine-tuned as time goes on. The broad overview of things |
| 1:46.4 | is that when it comes to opioid settlements and the status of them, you can think about it in this |
| 1:51.1 | way. I don't know if you're familiar with the now and later candy, but there are settlements |
| 1:55.5 | that states largely have now, and then there are the ones that are later. The now ones are from Johnson |
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