Does food help with high medical bills? Trial 'food as medicine' projects seek to demonstrate this

Medicaid generally only includes medical expenses, but Arkansas, Oregon, and Massachusetts were granted permission last year by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to use a portion of their Medicaid resources to pay for food programs such as medically tailored meals, groceries, and produce prescriptions (fruit and vegetable prescriptions or vouchers provided by medical professionals for people with diet-related diseases or food insecurity). California was already implementing a food program with the agreement of a separate institution. The goal is to determine if supplying healthy foods to individuals may successfully prevent, manage, and treat diet-related illnesses.

A lot of what ails our health-care system is overutilization because we've never changed the lifestyles that bring us into the health-care system in the first place, and that starts with your nutrition, Indiana Sen. Mike Braun declared during a December hearing.

How does 'food as medicine' function?

Though alternative procedures will be examined, Massachusetts and California enable doctors to send struggling patients to a local food aid group to assess their needs. These may include gift cards to grocery stores, kitchen supplies, cooking courses, nutrition counseling, or a service that delivers "medically customized meals" to patients. Patients in Massachusetts are checked on every three months.

The USDA committed $59.4 million in November to fund so-called "produce prescriptions" from health care providers for fresh vegetables and fruits.

Is it possible to use food as medicine?

The link between what we eat and how it impacts our health and mortality is evident, as stated by Dan Glickman, co-chair of the Task Force on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, during a December hearing.

According to a research published last October, if all patients in the United States with mobility issues and diet-related disorders got medically tailored meals, 1.6 million hospitalizations would be avoided, resulting in a net savings of $13.6 billion per year.

Another research published in 2019 discovered that the meals led to 49% fewer inpatient admissions and a 16% reduction in health care expenses over the course of nearly a year when compared to a control group of patients who did not get the meals.

What comes next?

Further research is needed to establish whether this concept can thrive and what are the best ways to execute it.

According to Kevin Volpp, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics and the initiative's leader, the American Heart Association and the Rockefeller Foundation will launch a $250 million "Food is Medicine" Research Initiative this spring to determine if such programs can be developed cost-effectively enough to receive benefit coverage and reimbursement for patients.

According to Madeline Guth, senior policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation's Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services requires such programs to be federal budget neutral and capped at 3% of the state's overall Medicaid expenditure.

Additional challenges include locating food sources, defining what constitutes "nutritious," and determining who would eventually qualify. Because of tight standards in place, only a tiny number of Medicaid participants are qualified for these pilots, according to Guth.

CMS is suggesting what it authorized for those states is laying the groundwork for what it is willing and seeking to approve for additional states, Guth added. There may be more, but these states will serve as a model and will be monitored over the next year or two.