Trump Still Won't Declare a National Emergency to Address the Opioid Crisis

His own bipartisan commission has recommended as much, but the president can't be bothered.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price announed Tuesday that President Donald Trump has no "immediate" plans to declare a state of emergency amid the growing national opioid crisis, despite the recommendation of a bipartisan commission.

New Jersey's Republican Governor Chris Christie headed the commission, which also asked the Trump administration to wave a federal rule that's preventing poor and disabled people from accessing health care related to opioid addiction.

"We say to the president, you must declare an emergency," Christie said on CNN last week, likely hoping that the TV-obsessed president would see the clip.

Instead, the U.S. was treated to Price parsing the word "emergency." "The president certainly believes that we will treat it as an emergency—and it is an emergency," Price said.

"Our citizens are dying," the bipartisan commission wrote in their report to the president. Opioid deaths have more than quadrupled since 1999, and there is no end in sight for the expanding crisis. Numbers for the last year aren't yet available, but they're expected to be the worst on record.

Making America "great again" doesn't seem to include the countless communities burying their children after overdoses of heroin and Fentanyl.