> I guess it is much better than the situation before that, where you paid $5000+ and they also gave you an opioid addiction.

Having a condition that actually warrants strong opioids and not being able to get them at any price is definitely not an improvement.

The problem is fundamentally that we want to pretend doctors can always distinguish two people describing the same symptoms when one person actually has them and the other is trying to get drugs. The often can't, so you can either make it hard for people to get pain medications even if they need them, or you can make it easy for people to get them even if they don't. And between these the second one is unambiguously better, because the first one is the government screwing innocent people and the second one is guilty people screwing themselves.