On Wednesday Gov. Tom Wolf urged legislators to work together and pass into law an extensive lineup of legislation addressing Pennsylvania’s opioid crisis. The bills, six in all, deal with everything from how doctors write prescriptions and manage patients’ long-term use of the drugs, to what medical schools teach students and what types of medication insurance companies are required to cover.

The bills may address obvious and uncontroversial issues. But Wolf is right to push the pace of reforms to the prescription and management of opioid drugs, which are widely viewed as responsible for the current heroin epidemic.

His comments came at an important moment. This week, the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council — an independent state agency formed in 1986 — released a report on neonatal hospital stays related to substance abuse.

The findings are shocking: between 2000 and 2015, the rate of newborns facing substance dependency-related issues spiked by 250 percent, according to the report. That equates to 19.5 out of every 1,000 children born in 2015. In 2000 that rate was just 5.6 per 1,000 births.

Butler County’s rate of substance abuse-related neonatal stays in 2015 — 36.8 per 1,000 — is even worse. And the county’s rate of substance-related maternal stays — hospital visits which include births and other pregnancy-related issues — is among the worst in Western Pennsylvania at 46.5 per 1,000.

The driver of these spikes is clearly opioids, the report found. Maternal stays fell for alcohol (down 36 percent) and cocaine (down 61 percent) but were more than made up for by a 510 percent spike in stays related to opioid drugs.

The message is clear: a generation of children are being born already addicted to opioids. The forward-looking financial and social implications of that revelation are horrifying.

And let’s not forget those who have already been lost to this crisis. Organizers of a candlelight walk in Butler read 183 names of overdose victims on Wednesday night, before friends and family members took to the streets in an effort to raise awareness of opioid addiction and overdose deaths. Those names represent a fraction of the thousands of Pennsylvanians killed each year by opioid overdoses.

Perhaps that’s why Sen. Gene Yaw, R-Williamsport, said he doesn’t expect the situation to improve quickly.

“I will feel very fortunate if we can make a difference in this problem in 10 years,” Yaw said following Wolf’s remarks.

Yaw has years of effort hosting hearings on the opioid crisis under his belt. He is no slouch in this area. That’s why his statement is particularly troubling. A decade is simply too long to wait for measurable progress on opioid addiction and treatment.

The state needs to enact thoughtful and well-vetted legislation on this matter — it does no one any good to have poorly-written laws on the books. But we also want to see our leaders set more aggressive goals regarding outcomes.

The next 10 years cannot mirror the previous 15. Sooner or later, “change takes time” stops being an acceptable answer for why things aren’t getting better.