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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.'"
I'm pretty tolerant of articles for slashdot, but this seems really far off subject.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
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.
Yes, there's food stamp laundring out there, but with such small amounts, most people really are using them to avoid health issues related to starvation.
If we dropped those subsidies that farmers get for keeping farm land out of production, and also drop price supports that keep food prices higher than they would be, you could plow half of that money into food stamps and probably have something line 4x the impact.
Foodstamps are run out of the Department of Agriculture, who also end up handing out price supports, and land banking payments. The mission of the department is to make sure every American gets fed.
They need to stop working against their own mission. The whole idea of paying farmers not to farm is wrong headed.
If the department wants to tinker with farming, they should fund crop development that provides greater variety in the foods American eat. Instead we live one chicken beef, and wheat and potatoes, essentially a mono-diet.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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);
Take out the choice
The department of Agriculture, which runs the Food Stamp Program, is tasked by law to make sure there is enough food for everyone and that everyone gets fed. Food stamps were born by order of the Supreme Court, not Congress.
I'm pretty sure you won't find much support for having DOA nannies standing at every dinner table to make sure everyone on food stamps eats their collard greens. I'm positive you would accomplish nothing with this approach.
There is no way you can supply food support while at the same time make sure that no budget shifting takes place. They money that might have gone for what people get for free on food stamps will be directed to other foods. Or what-ever. Food stamps were not intended to fix stupid. Just Hungry. You ALREADY can't buy beer on food stamps, stop trying to micromanage the program you apparently know nothing about.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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?
Foodstamps are run out of the Department of Agriculture, who also end up handing out price supports, and land banking payments. The mission of the department is to make sure every American gets fed.
That's a large part of it. But I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around something that was in the summary: it said that 1 in 7 Americans are on stamps. That's an appalling statistic -- 1 in 7 Americans are poor enough that they wouldn't be able to feed themselves without government assistance?
While I agree that paying farmers not to actually produce food is ridiculous, plenty of other countries manage to feed their people without needing to resort to a program like that. Food stamps aren't the problem, they're the symptom.
>The whole idea of paying farmers not to farm is wrong headed.
Yet another person who doesn't understand land and soil conversation, and the long term effects of farming on soil health.
I don't know the specific numbers, but food stamps / EBT is relatively easy to get, and the exact amount received monthly is calculated based on the income and size of the family. A family might only get $75 a month, for example. So saying that "1 in 7 Americans are poor enough that they wouldn't be able to feed themselves without government assistance" is certainly not the case, as many of the recipients are only getting a small amount to help supplement their food purchases.
A quick googling shows that the average amount received monthly is $133.08. Of course some families may receive several times that amount, and others much less. The maximum gross income for a family of 4 to receive any SNAP benefits is somewhere around $2,800. According to this online calculator, a family of 4 with an income of $2,800 would get $8 a month assistance. If the income is $2,500 it jumps up to $80 a month.
Better known as 318230.
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.
>A portion of the government wants as many people on food stamps as possible, because as soon as you condition a person to free handouts you get power over them.
I've heard that before - indeed almost exactly the same words - but I don't understand. It's so vague.
1) Which portion of the government? Are you talking about some federal or state employees, or are you referring to politicians? After that, can you get even more specific and give examples of persons doing this conditioning and then exercising power?
2) What do these employees or politicians DO with this power over some poor people? Do the government employees make them come over to mow their lawn? It can't be politicians saying "You must vote for me or I'll cut off your food stamps" because we have a secret ballot. The most that could be done is "if you stop putting me in, the Republicans will probably cut off everybody's food stamps, including yours"...but that applies to every public-spending decision. "Vote Republican or those Democrats will raise your taxes" is exactly the same proposition, and seems to be pretty legitimate. You might as well say "if you condition people to tax cuts, that gives you power over them".
If that sounds sarcastic or something, sorry ... I'm not trying to pick a fight, it's just the whole statement doesn't compute for me. I'll take up the same position if you've got some specific examples or something.
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.
>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.
Have you tried to reword that in the correct fashion?
We have record numbers of Americans that rely on the government for their food and have doubled the amount of money we spend on food stamps.
You also neglect that most of the people on food stamps ALSO HAVE A JOB.
You also neglect that the average household size on foodstamps is 2 and only a very small percentage of foodstamps households are over 4.
I'd go on debunking the rest of your 'talking points', but I'm not going to convince you of your ignorance on the matter, and you're not going to do any research to enlighten yourself on the matter.
> 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?
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.
"Obesity is inversely related to income because healthy foods cost more than unhealthy ones."
I hate this "myth". It is absolutely false and untrue that healthy foods cost more.
You can go to the store and get eggs, potatoes, chicken, carrots and any canned vegetable and milk very inexpensively.
What are the unhealthy foods that cost less than these items? Doritoes? No. Cookies? Not Oreos and such.
My observation is that lower income people generally view food as "an escape" and one of the few creature comforts they have access to.
Is isn't really the price.
Studies have shown that overweight people choose to buy foods of convenience (fast food, open and eat packaged food, microwave and eat food) and avoid difficult to prepare foods (ones that require 15-30 minutes of preparation).
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
>Except for the problem that being a single parent is 100% an individual choice for individuals born with their reproductive systems on the inside.
Except that the same people who are suggesting the cuts in food programs are:
1. Fighting abortion and birth control education funding.
2. Fighting mandates that birth control be covered by insurance.
3. Proposing that abortions in case of rape be illegal.
4. Passing laws reducing availability of abortion clinics.
80% of the bad loans were issued by financial institutions not even subject to the CRA.
http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2008/09/community_reinv.html
That's a large part of it. But I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around something that was in the summary: it said that 1 in 7 Americans are on stamps. That's an appalling statistic -- 1 in 7 Americans are poor enough that they wouldn't be able to feed themselves without government assistance?
There are two Americas. One in which a lot of people like those who work at WalMart, and fast food joints work, and yes, a lot of those folks qualify easily for Food stamps.
Minimum wage is the working wage for many people. And while it is common for many to bray about how a higher minimum wage is a job killer, who picks up that tab for the food stamps? Hint, it's the rest of us. And that's the big thing. These companies have managed to get the taxpayers to pay for their employees food stamps so that we can have "Everyday Low Low Prices!"
And let's not forget Section 8 housing, so that these people have a place to live.
So what to do? Unless we want to engage in some horrible Soylent Green solution, we have a lot of people out there who need to have some way of feeding and housing themselves. And despite what some say, a lot of these people work very hard, not a "Welfare Queen" in sight. For many of these folk, a Job at WalMart is about th height they can aspire to. And that's okay - I think that for too long, Americans have been sold the idea that the only thing keeping anyone from wealth and fame is their "will" or lack of it.
I'm not even sure how we do it at this point, because it is a mess. If we take as a starting point that the average American should be able to afford a modest house and to be self sufficient in feeding and clothing their family - that is becoming difficult. And if we have the idea that if the person who is willing to work, they should be able to support themselves, it becomes even more daunting. GIven that the average age of a McDonald's worker is now alomst 30, we can see that some folks are now trying to eke out a career in these places. At our local Mickey D's, a lot of the workers have degrees. They just don't have anywhere up the ladder to go. And they aren't lazy either.
For myself, I rose well out of the social level that I was born into. And at one point, I thought that "will" was all it took. But upon retirement, and upon reflection, I did all that by being sort of pathological, which is not a trait that would work if everyone had it - we'd all be at each other throats.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
If the US had a liveable minimum wage it would help. In Australia the minimum is around $20 us an hour. That none of you see the stupidity of expecting people to work to earn less than they need to survive is typical of the I've got mine stuff you nature of Americans, or to put it simply selfish bastards.
A 2 liter of Walmart's own house brand soda?
2 liters = 4.23 pts, a little more than 1/2 gallon. Current price, observed today, in an actual Walmart: 55 cents US.
So, YES THE MILK IS MORE EXPENSIVE. People averaging results such as mine have figured out it's more expensive currently by a factor of about 3 and 1/4 to 1. Thank you for playing "I'm so out of touch that I think the average minimum wage worker buys the expensive brands and I'll sieze on that to 'prove' there's no problem." Please look at how much space your own Walmart devotes to their own generic brand and how much to the big name brands on the shelves. If it's 2 to 1 or better, well, there's your quick visual gauge of how bad poverty is in your area. Some stores have ratios above 5 to 1.
Who is John Cabal?
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
Why would we want that?
Because we have a soul.
Here we are talking about a welfare program that costs productive members of society money.
Yes. Money is clearly more important than things like being humane and decent.
The poor/dependent classes are just that, poor, dependent and unproductive.
Therefore we should simply kill them. Afterall, it would improve productivity and enhance cash flow.
You make it seem like we do it to get benefit from them, when in actual fact we don't get anything from them besides crime.
Yes. Every poor person is just a cesspool of crime with no redeeming qualities of any kind. All human beings can be judged solely by their bank account balance.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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