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Doctors Say Food Stamp Cuts Could Cause Higher Healthcare Costs
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Lauran Neergaard writes at the Christian Science Monitor that doctors are warning that if Congress cuts food stamps, the federal government could be socked with bigger health bills because over time the poor wind up seeking treatment in doctors' offices or hospitals as a result. 'If you're interested in saving health care costs, the dumbest thing you can do is cut nutrition,' says Dr. Deborah Frank of Boston Medical Center, who founded the Children's HealthWatch pediatric research institute. 'People don't make the hunger-health connection.' Food stamps feed 1 in 7 Americans and cost almost $80 billion a year, twice what it cost five years ago. The doctors' lobbying effort comes as Congress is working on a compromise farm bill that's certain to include food stamp cuts. Republicans want heftier reductions than do Democrats in yet another partisan battle over the government's role in helping poor Americans. Conservatives say the program spiraled out of control as the economy struggled and the costs are not sustainable. However research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that a cut of $2 billion a year in food stamps could trigger in an increase of $15 billion in medical costs (PDF) for over the next decade. Other research shows children from food-insecure families are 30 percent more likely to have been hospitalized for a range of illnesses. 'Food is medicine,' says Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern, who has led the Democrats' defense of the food stamp program. 'Critics focus almost exclusively on how much we spend, and I wish they understood that if we did this better, we could save a lot more money in health care costs.'"
$2 billion/year x 10 years = $20 billion > $15 billion
I'm pretty tolerant of articles for slashdot, but this seems really far off subject.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
...from a "Dollar amount" to specifics foods or types of food. No $$$, just "Bag of apples/fruit", "Vegetables", "Loaf of Bread", "Milk", "Orange/Apple Juice", etc.
Perhaps have specific Food Stamp distribution centers instead of just about any old store accepting them. Take out the choice and lower the direct fraud (once they get the food from the program, there's not much you can do to stop them selling it if they choose, unless we just set up meal kitchens instead of food stamp, although that has it's appeal as well.)
Growing up, I always thought that the goal of civilisation was to alleviate suffering.
On economic grounds, it will cost net $500 million more per year (($2B x 10 - $15B) / 10) to keep people in adequate nutrition. By US budget standards, that's pissing in the ocean.
On humanitarian grounds, there is no question that the money must be allocated.
If society's job isn't to improve the lot of humanity, it has no purpose. If we look only at ourselves, we are no better than apes.
Your multi-billion dollar business go under? Get a huge bailout from taxpayers.
Have five kids with four different fathers? Taxpayers will cover your kids' entire upbringing.
Your bank cause a market crash? Taxpayers are forced to cover your corruption.
Stopped looking for work for a few years? Here's free food and housing courtesy of taxpayers.
"Food stamps feed 1 in 7 Americans and cost almost $80 billion a year, twice what it cost five years ago".
So we've doubled the amount of money we spend on food stamps and we have record numbers of Americans that rely on the government for their food. I wonder which way the vote. When you don't work and get your income from the government (who gets its money from taxpayers) then there is no incentive to look for work. Have some kids, collect some checks, and don't ever look for work. And with all the unemployment and record food stamp usage both parties are now talking about letting millions of illegal immigrants into this country and legalizing the ones that are already here.
And of course cue the screaming. "Corporate welfare is worse than individual welfare". They are both a major drain on society. And individual welfare is now a record drain. There's no incentive to succeed anymore. There's no incentive for personal responsibility. You can have six kids out of wedlock and be rewarded by the state with free food and housing. This happens on such a massive scale that we lose billions annually creating a system that encourages broken homes, unwanted children, and bastard children with no future as productive citizens.
Look. Get off of your moral high horse and look at the fundamental fact that shitty food costs less. You can buy 4 two litre bottles of soda for the cost of a gallon of milk. You can buy 4 boxes of lil debbie snack cakes for the cost of a lb of chicken. You CAN NOT expect people to live on rice and lettuce because "they are poor, so they don't deserve any better food". At this point, who cares what they eat, so long as they can eat. Once everyone is fed, then we will worry about what they eat. Even then, the solution is education, not persecution
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
From the linked PDF: "Thus, diabetes costs alone could nearly equal CBO’s estimate of $20 billion in savings over 10 years from implementing proposed SNAP changes in H.R.1947, in addition to any costs associated with other diseases."
I currently get food stamps and they provide the entirety of my food budget. I am well educated and know my way around a kitchen so I can keep myself fit and healthy for well under the $187/month I get. But if I wanted, I could buy candy, coke, and chips and try and live off of that. If you are on food stamps you can NOT simply rely on prepackaged heat and serve meals - you'll either run out of money or not get the nutrition you need. You need to focus on the basics: beans, rice, lentils, fresh fruits and veggies, and only occasionally some raw chicken (forget your love affair with beef, its too expensive). In my view, the problem is with education rather than money. Teach people how to cook and what to cook and they'll be healthy. Barrage them with ads for canned raviolis and Doritos and you'll get people who think that cooking simply involves heating things up. The food stamp program needs to be revised so that you are prohibited from purchasing junk foods just like alcohol or cigarettes can't be bought. In addition to restricting crap foods, allow people to purchase things like vitamins, toothpaste, and toilet paper with their food stamps. Being on food stamps is not fun, but for many people it is not a choice (the elderly or disabled) so lets make the program actually work for the benefit of those who receive the money.
I'm somewhat shocked that 1 in 7 american's is dependent on foodstamps to get by...
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Almost any political position is believed by its followers to be something that affects people's lives, and thus can be spun as affecting health care costs. It's just as easy to do it for the other side. Just take the standard political argument and tack on "so it affects health care costs". For instance, conservatives say that the costs hurt the economy. Well, in a worse economy, people have more health care problems (for hopefully obvious reasons). So food stamps increase health care costs because although they provide food (reducing health care costs), they also harm the economy by a marginal amount (increasing health care costs). If the latter effect is larger, then food stamps are a health care disaster.
And it's unlikely that the study which claimed that cutting food stamps increases health care costs by 15 billion took into account the possibility that paying for food stamps hurts the economy and health care costs are larger in a worse economy.
I can claim that gun control decreases health care costs (because it reduces gun violence and victims of violence use hospitals--this has been claimed for real). I could on the other hand claim that looser gun laws decrease health care costs (because people can use guns to protect themselves from criminals and people hurt by criminals use hospitals). Maybe we need stronger drug laws (stoned people don't take care of themselves very well) or weaker drug laws (the drug war sends people to prison where health is bad and they can't earn a living when they get out since they have an arrest record, making them poor, and so more likely to have high health care costs).
How about arguing that censoring video games reduces health care costs? (fewer teens will become criminals if you censor games; less crime means fewer people sent to hospitals by criminals). It's all about disguising a political position as a nonpartisan one, not about health care.
Healthy food costs less than shitty food. Some examples:
A gallon of water costs less than a gallon of soda.
A pound of frozen vegetables costs less than a pound candy.
A pound of chicken costs less than a pound of hamburger.
A dozen eggs costs less than a dozen candy eggs.
A pound of potatoes costs less than a pound of potato-chips.
This is all anecdotal, of course.
Uneducated single mothers living in slums with 5+ kids should just get a better job. Advice from a white guy sitting in a suburban home in front of his expensive computer.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
You also need to count:
1) Lost worker productivity costs to the economy (most of these people have jobs)
2) Increased welfare costs (these new sick people are the age of parents and caretakers)
3) Increased long term health care costs (these sick people will not disappear in 10 years)
The costs of creating a huge underclass has serious economic implications. Ask any teacher and they will tell you that the kids they have trouble teaching are the ones who don't get enough food to eat, and those who don't live in safe neighborhoods. You know, the ones you're too afraid of driving through.
The fact that there are hungry children in this country should make you feel ashamed about gleefully cutting programs that feed the poor. And you don't even have the math partially right, nor do you seem understand the basic economic facts that operate in all known current economic theory (and common sense): taking care of a population's health (including nutrition) through a public service is much cheaper for societies than only guaranteeing emergency services, unless we start euthanizing the poor in hospital parking lots. That's how two dozen other countries provide 100% coverage for at least half the cost per capita with similar health outcomes.
These new puppet conservatives do not have common sense or common decency, and further, they lack a prime signifier of adulthood: the ability to put the needs of others above their own wants. Why you would want to support them in their quest to keep tax cuts for people who don't need them while gutting basic services to the next generation of Americans is quite mysterious, unless being a parasite of the aristocratic class is something that appeals to you.
And let's face it, that's all the Republican party is. As proof of this fact, name one Republican policy that benefits the poor to the detriment of the rich. Just one.
Christ may have died for the poor, but the GOP fights for the wealthy. It's an odd reality for the party of God, isn't it?
You'll be happy to find out that SNAP (aka "food stamps") is already one of the best run programs our government has ever set up in terms of efficency and lack of fraud. It is a model for effective solutions to social problems. That fraud is rampant among SNAP receipients is simply a myth--and one that has been deliberatly crafted over generations to achieve certain political goals.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
> a bigbox store like walmart wants to open up and provide jobs that pay a wage
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-13/how-mcdonald-s-and-wal-mart-became-welfare-queens.html
How about when the girl gets on welfare with one kid you tell her "Here's the pill, here's where you can get condoms. If you get pregnant again you will be dropped from welfare and charged with child endangerment."
Why should people that are themselves dependents have the right to create more dependents with no consequences?
Somekind of wage at all is a great idea. We should re-invent the company store. Ban all labor unions, Dispatch with the EPA and OSHA. Dismiss minimum wages. Fuck, while where at it lets bring back slavery, because you know their masters had to take care of their slaves too.
Or you could wake the fuck up and read American history from 1850 to current and learn why we have many of the labor and wage laws we do. You have a wonderfully deluded idea that the past was some great and epic time where things where fair and anyone that wanted to work was showered with good wages. It is unfortunate that reality disagrees with you.
I agree it's pathetic, but you should really do more than simply blame them for it. These types of behaviors are ways people have of coping with a life situation they aren't happy with. While it would be better for them work to change their life situation to something better, if they were going to do that they probably would have done it by now. The bad thing about food stamps is they encourage this kind of coping over healthier behaviors.
But if you are going to take the tough love approach and cut off their food stamps, which I agree must be done, you do still need to make sure there's love in that action. If you treat them like you hate or distain them, you are going to push them further down the path they're already on.
Why should anyone the right to create more people with no consequences?
I don't see why this is a problem exclusively surrounding poor people. We live in an overcrowded world.
I worked in one of those stores. A single mother of five is almost certainly better off not joining the staff.
She's starting 20 hours a week* at just above minimum wage. That's about $160 a week. Daycare for five kids destroys that. Since it's a big box store all associates are expected to open once a week and close once a week, and they really like to change the schedule every week so you have no clue whether you'll be home Tuesday night three weeks from now, which means she has no clue whether your eldest will need to babysit his brothers or he can agree to go to an Academic Games tournament.
In other words getting the job is going to make her a worse mother without bringing in anywhere near enough to pay the bills. The only reasons for her to take the job are a) it might convince some self-righteous asshole who inherited $500k and turned his hobby into a job in the State Senate that she's not one of Those People, allowing her to keep her government benefits longer, and b) it qualifies her for the Earned Income Credit at tax time.
The reason left-wing working-class black city councils tend to be anti-Walmart isn't that black people are stupid morons who've been brainwashed by hippies, it's that they've done this math.
*Cashiers at my store usually start at 10 hours, and cashier is the entry-level for almost all women who are hired in, so 20 hours is probably an exaggeration. Garden is the other way women get in, they only get 20-25 hours there, and it's not unusual for Corporate to decree that there's no budget to hire them permanently after six months.
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> How about when the girl gets on welfare with one kid you tell her "Here's the pill, here's where you can get condoms.
That's fine in theory. Except for the fact that the people that want to gut Food Stamps also want to destroy sex education and any form of family planning. The openly attack the private organizations that provide birth control pills and condoms to would be welfare mothers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
All of the fat asses will have less food. If they want better nutrition maybe they should get a better job.
Well, one small problem... okay, a couple:
Grocery stores are a bit rare in the ghetto, and those few which exist usually charge exorbitant prices while providing very little in the way of variety (and don't ask about the produce.)
Most of these mothers have a shit education courtesy of public schooling (assuming the mother actually completed high school - usually she didn't), so "dinner" usually means fast-food takeout, or whatever the local bodega has in the way of food (imagine growing up on convenience store burritos and soda every night...)
Jobs suck in depressed areas - triply so if you have no education.
Moving (or even saving up enough money to do that) is a trial at best - especially when you consider that most "services" in depressed areas are geared towards screwing over the poor (see also payday loans, credit cards, etc).
Finally, the capper: government assistance sucks. It is geared towards insuring that once you are on it, you never come off of it. The moment you start making any money, you get taxed hard, you lose the assistance funding, and they kick you out of that government-assisted housing. Oh, and since you haven't the education or funds to access tax specialists or any other real option, you're basically fucked and stuck.
Now this isn't always the case - with the help of family, you can pull yourself out of such straits. However, because family has been pretty much obliterated over the decades in these areas by the lack of fathers, and by an overweening demand by certain ideologues that family is an anachronism? Well, it's part of how you wind up with a permanent underclass. ...and no one seems to want to fix this. The right wants to cut down funds in order to force initiative and drive, while the left wants to smooth over it with more money. To be honest, neither answer is correct - but a hybrid of the two would work well, if done right. Put a time limit on the funds, but require the recipient take classes, look for work, etc - then provide enough assistance towards the end so that the newly-working single mother isn't faced with instant penalties just for making a paycheck.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Detroit collapsed because people left as the auto industry there was collapsing. This had nothing to do with welfare. Also there was the whole thing with white flight which drastically drove down property values. Corruption of city officials and mismanagement of funds also contributed. However, if the pensions were adequately funded as they were supposed to be, then Detroit would be fine today. http://www.freep.com/interactive/article/20130915/NEWS01/130801004/Detroit-Bankruptcy-history-1950-debt-pension-revenue
I'm not saying the fat guy you watched was right, but OTOH when I was on food stamps my actual job involved burning 4,000 calories a day as a loader at a Home Depot. My food-stamp budget was $117 a month. I had no car. I had no place to store food in my room. This meant the way middle class people save money (ie: making nutritious lunch at home and bringing it to work) was impossible. Therefore was spending $6-$7 every workday on lunch at Wendy's. Which meant the $117 had to buy the other 1,000-1,500 calories a day or I'd fucking die of starvation. That meant pop and candy. With all this I still ended up losing like 40-50 pounds. My teeth are shit, but I'm alive. And if I'd tried to eat like a middle class person I wouldn't be.
My current situation is somewhat better monetarily, but the things middle class people assume I have when they give me food advice still don't apply. My fridge is about 1.5 cubic feet. This is enough room for a jug of milk and an apple. I do not have a stove. I do not have a car, so food that is at all hard to get (ie: isn't at every single Walmart) will not happen. Since taking multiple grocery bags on the bus is a huge pain in the ass (and my commute alone is already 2 hours on the bus system every single fucking day) multiple grocery trips every month to said Walmart will not happen.
Being poor the options open to you are simply so different that the strategies a middle class person develops for dealing with the world simply don't apply. Take the simple advice from the eater's manifesto: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." Rules 1 and 3 are useless to me because I can't afford 'food,' and I can't store vegetables. You might as well give me three sure-fire rules for blowing up an Imperial Star Destroyer using only a Bat'leth.
And yes, I'm aware that one of those is Star Wars and the other is Star Trek.
It's not exclusively a poor problem. However, I don't think it is unreasonable that someone that can't afford to take care of themselves be asked to not increase their expenses by their own choice while taking hand outs.
A pointless and moralistic stance.
Sure, but that's beside the point.
Opposition to contraceptives and proper sex education is purely malicious.
Let me make sure I understand this.
Congress is waging war over $2 billion in budget cuts. In a budget that is around $3 trillion. The deficit alone is $680 billion.
Let's frame this in context. This is arguing over a 2 cent line item on a $300 bill.
And we wonder why our government is the laughing stock of the free world.
I would go with one of the birth control implants (they are both trivially reversible, and you only have to remember to take it once ever few years).
You have to be careful with the "it's for the children" argument. If you let people use children as human shields, they will. While it sounds humane in the short run, it isn't in the long run. I know that there are a lot of people who don't believe that parents would willfully abuse their children, but it most certainly happens regularly.
That being said, I keep moving closer and closer to being a proponent of a minimum income for everyone. I believe that we are rapidly approaching (or may have already past) the point that there simply isn't enough real work for everyone to have a job. Sure their are plenty of ditches that could be dug with a spoon, but that isn't really productive.
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What are you going to do, put them in prison which costs $60k/year per person? Not helping costs more than giving them money.
I saw military jets do a flyover over our local University football stadium this weekend.
Now, tell me more about this wasted $13.50 that you witnessed...
I don't respond to AC's.
My (black) son-in-law Chucky started a business installing, dismantling and rehabbing office cubicles a few years back. He's been growing it steadily, almost entirely through referrals and repeats.
He routinely beats white-owned competitors on both quality and price. He gets no government help, and is only now starting to go after government contracts.
You were saying?
The end game of these libertarian fantasies is the literal wholesale murder of millions of poor "undesirables", either directly on the small scale and justified as self defense or the defence of property, or enmasse through isolation into ghettos and systematic starvation. It would dwarf the Holocaust in numbers of dead.
If you start with the premise (itself not unreasonable) that every individual has a right to defend themselves from harm and their property from theft, and you have millions of people with no ability to survive other than the appropriation of resources by force, you're going to end up with a lot of dead humans. And when the tent cities gather enough boldness and enough desperation to march on the proper cities, then you'd have the military and police slaughtering thousands at a time to protect the property rights of the middle and upper classes.
Horrifying to imagine, but there are some people who would not only be willing to go through this conflagration, but would practically welcome it. Indeed, some are even working in earnest to bring it about. They want to see the streets run red with the blood of the poor. The worst reflection I've ever had on the human condition is that some of them don't just see this nightmare as a horrible means justified by a glorious utopian end--the process itself satisfies some dark urge inside them to cause pain on the largest scale possible. If evil exists, this is it.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Republican businessmen themselves know better than to work at starvation wages.
I once heard a management consultant give a presentation to a bunch of printers. He ran through the costs of running a folding machine, and it came out to something like $50 an hour. He said, if you sell folding for less than $50 an hour, you're losing money. And the harder you work, the more money you're losing. A lot of printers have very busily gone out of business.
If you're an employee, you'll lose money on a minimum wage job, and you're better off not working at that rate.
Most people who work for Wallmarts are making less than it takes for them to survive. Some of them do get welfare, more of them get food stamps, if they have children they get child tax credits, and they can't afford doctors, so if they get sick, they go to the emergency room and the rest of us pay for it.
And religion is their solution, because it teaches people about long-held human moral principals like don't have kids out of wedlock, families should stick together, and communities should help each other.
They talk a big game, but when push comes to shove, let's face facts - most 'Christians' in America ('cuz let's face it, when we say "religion," they're the group we're likely discussing) don't give a fuck about helping the poor. They just don't.
Most of them spend their hour with Jesus on Sunday (an extra one on Wednesday for the AoG scammers), and the minute they hit the fucking parking lot, they go back to being the same selfish, narcissistic assclowns they are every other day of the week. I get to see the behavior regularly, by virtue of the fact my home is surrounded by churches; I've learned that leaving the house at noon on a Sunday is just not going to happen, because most of those goodly "Christians" would sooner run you into the ditch than let you out of your own fucking driveway.
You can talk about all the moralistic high-ground as you want, but until that talk translates into actually helping people, you're not accomplishing anything except paying lip-service. To me, that's worse than doing nothing at all.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
But if you are going to take the tough love approach and cut off their food stamps, which I agree must be done, you do still need to make sure there's love in that action. If you treat them like you hate or distain them, you are going to push them further down the path they're already on.
Excuse me, you're getting in the way of all this righteous indignation we've worked up here. If we can't blame the poor and ignorant for their poverty and ignorance, how can we look down on our fellow man and absolve ourselves of any responsibility to help them?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
For additional perspective, I participated in a hackathon in NYC last spring that focused on food insecurity in Newark, NJ. The problem was that in many poorer parts of Newark there are virtually no supermarkets and no produce to be had. Most people had to get food at corner delis because they did not have cars and could not get to a larger market. Now the problem was, none of the food at the delis had price tags, and no receipts were given after purchase. So the deli owners could and did charge ridiculous prices like $4/lb for apples at the beginning of the month, when everyone got their SNAP benefits, and then extend credit with interest to customers at the end of the month when those benefits had been exhausted. So everyone was under the thumb of their local deli owner and you had to keep good relations with him or he could decide to charge you $7/lb for apples or refuse to extend you credit to get you through the end of the month. It was difficult for us techies to wrap our heads around, but the problem is real and pernicious. There are places in this country where large numbers of people suffer under food slavery, and cutting the SNAP benefits they rely on compounds the problem severely.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.