Alternative explanation: the quality of care has been declining, for instance because of the ridiculously higher administrative spending in healthcare.
And the thing about painkillers is that they "fix" (to the patients' satisfaction) a hell of a lot of problems ... while bringing in extra money for the doctor and hospital. Any incompetent doctor, or just one that doesn't get the time to diagnose (administrators need to be paid, and that's justified by "productivity" of doctors. Productivity mostly means faster diagnoses. One very effective way to do that, of course, is just to make incomplete diagnoses)
Secondly giving a painkiller is almost never a stupidly wrong decision (unlike taking out a kidney that then in a biopsy turns out to be fully healthy, regardless of how many symptoms matched). So it's ALSO low risk ! And I assure you, there are no words in the universe that cause administrators to drool half as much as the words "low risk".
Didn't we want market-based medicine ? Well, this is one instance where the market based choice is blatantly obvious.
Secondly I fear like now we're seeing the opposite reaction: people are acting against patients that have chronic pain and would not be able to function without constant painkillers. These patients will go back to self-medication (ie. alcohol and/or cocaine, both "decent" painkillers) like people did 50 years ago. It is not a good evolution to replace morphine with alcohol or cocaine.