Another victim of sweeping budget cuts affecting the National Institutes of Health (NIH), The Office of Pain Planning and Policy (OPPP) has been shuttered, or may be down to just one, lone ranger.

Why is this important?

According to the NIH, about 51.6 million American adults suffer from chronic pain.  About 20% are people under the age of 35. They’ll spend more than half their lives struggling to … have a decent life. The number grows each year as more and more chronic pain conditions are identified.

If we just look at the numbers, which is what this is purportedly all about, the NIH tallies the economic cost of lost productivity, unemployment, disability and healthcare directly stemming from chronic pain at $560 to $635 billion a year. That’s based on real data from state and federal disability, unemployment, Medicaid and Medicare costs.  These aren’t fake numbers.

It’s unclear what the OPPP budget was, but the entire NIH budget is $46 billion. That’s 8.2% of what we’re losing every year to a disease that strikes more people than heart disease, diabetes and cancer combined.  Let’s say OPPP’s budget was more like 5% of NIH’s total budget (they probably wish). That’s $2.3 billion. Compared to the $560 to $635 billion a year we lose to the cost of pain, $2.3 billion seems like a reasonable investment to stop the bleeding.

Let’s be clear. 

The $560 to $635 billion isn’t just government funds spent on disability and Medicaid claims. Those numbers include the lost income of people who are unemployed, partially employed or who’ve had to take lower paying jobs because their pain keeps them from working for higher wages. 

They come from all walks of life. They’re nurses, construction workers, firemen, police, truck drivers, movers and landscapers. They’re people whose jobs require standing all day, including food service workers, retail sales people, cashiers, security guards and surgeons. Yes, surgeons. 

The average bypass surgery takes 3-6 hours. About 400,000 bypass surgeries are performed in America each year by about 4,000 board-certified cardiovascular surgeons. They don’t have the luxury of just performing life-saving surgery when they feel good. 

Many people must pass drug tests in the workplace, so they can’t use many of the drugs prescribed today for the pain they endure. Healthcare workers, firemen, police and other emergency first responders are among those for whom opioid use is usually forbidden while on the job. So they work through pain from repeated injuries and back-breaking work – or they don’t work. They don’t save lives. 

In a study of Veterans treated at Boston Healthcare for the Homeless from 2003 - 2008, "50-63% of adults in shelters reported chronic pain and only half said it was being treated." That's often because they can no longer be prescribed the opioids needed to treat severe chronic pain.

While these studies don’t draw a straight line from chronic pain to unemployment, homelessness and drug addiction, the potential existence of such a cycle portends chilling social consequences for everybody.

Finding better solutions than addictive drugs and early retirement is a MUST.

While we can all agree that government spending should be more efficient, cutting programs like the OPPP will cost us more than we save – for generations to come.

Learn More:

Pain Research and Treatment Missing From 2026 HHS Budget
https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2025/6/2/pain-research-and-treatment-missing-from-2026-hhs-budget

Cutting research that helps Americans deal with severe pain
https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article303695391.html

Unique pain research office eliminated in HHS purge
https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/08/nih-layoffs-include-entire-division-devoted-to-chronic-pain/