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Expanding Medicaid eligibility could affect prescriptions of buprenorphine with naloxone, an established treatment for opioid use disorder, and opioid pain relievers (OPRs).

To examine changes in prescriptions of buprenorphine with naloxone and OPRs after the US Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion.

In this cohort study, longitudinal, patient-level, retail pharmacy claims were extracted from IQVIA real-world data from an anonymized, longitudinal, prescription database. The sample included 11.9 million individuals who filled 2 or more prescriptions for a prescription opioid during at least 1 year between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2015, from California, Maryland, and Washington (expansion states) and Florida and Georgia (nonexpansion states). Data analysis was conducted from August 1, 2017, to May 31, 2018. Data were aggregated to county …