What does YOUR healthcare cover?
Typical healthcare plans cover dental, medical, maybe hearing and vision depending on your plan, but could it cover food?
According to the Associated Press: Next year, Medicare will start testing meal program vouchers for patients with malnutrition as part of a broader look at improving care and reducing costs. ( Murphy, apnews.com) Around the time the pandemic started, one health insurance company started calling clients and asking if they had enough to eat, and how they planned to get enough food during the lockdown. This opened a line of thinking and experimentation across the health insurance industry… could health insurance cover food?
Scientific and medical research has proven that without adequate access to nutritional food, people will have worse health outcomes throughout their life. This specifically applies to vulnerable populations, including older adults on Medicare and Medicaid.
So what inspired the insurer to call his clients? He states: “We’ve seen time and again, the lack of good and nutritional food causes members to get readmitted.”( Murphy, apnews.com) Coronavirus hasn’t done us any “favors” but it has opened our eyes to what healthcare could be in the future and where we are dismally failing. One of the “lessons learned” is that healthcare needs to move from a fee-for-service model where providers are reimbursed for conducting specific procedures or prescribing certain medications, to a value-based care model. In the value-based care model, people are treated based on what they need and the quality of care they receive.
The pandemic also illuminated the extreme disparities and inequities of our healthcare system. We saw unequal effects of the virus in poorer neighborhoods of color and states that lack proper healthcare infrastructure. We will see more as time progresses and more research is conducted, giving us harrowing stories of how we need to improve. For now, we can reasonably infer that people who were food insecure before the Pandemic are going to be even worse off during the Pandemic.
Many older adults depend on meal delivery services or the help of their support networks for food. At the same time, many older adults travel to the grocery store themselves. All of that was threatened with Covid-19. The lockdowns alone restricted travel, and then you add the fear of contracting a deadly virus, many people no longer elected to take their weekly grocery shopping trips. Worrying about infecting vulnerable people, the routine visits of caregivers also stopped, resulting in widespread food insecurity among older adults. Even before the pandemic, Feeding America found that in 2018, 5.3 million or 7.3% of seniors (ages 60+) were food insecure. (feedingamerica.org)
The AP states: “Medicaid programs in several states are testing or developing food coverage. Next year, Medicare will start testing meal program vouchers for patients with malnutrition as part of a broader look at improving care and reducing costs. Nearly 7 million people were enrolled last year in a Medicare Advantage plan that offered some sort of meal benefit, according to research from the consulting firm Avalere Health. That’s more than double the total from 2018.” (apnews.com, Tom Murphy)
Many health insurance plans already provide temporary food assistance for various events such as when returning home from the hospital. Plans are going to start moving in this direction because it is becoming widely understood and accepted that food is medicine. People need nutritious healthy food to stay healthy and this is especially true for vulnerable populations and people with existing health conditions. If you have diabetes for example, without proper nutrition, you could end up in the hospital. Right now hospital visits are extremely risky, nevermind expensive (note our previous article on cost of transportation during the pandemic.)
We can expect plans to start rolling our meal assistance programs in the near future. Many plans are already providing prepaid grocery credit cards to low-income seniors. A new thing to look and ask for when you sign up for Medicare in 2022? We will see!
Source(s): https://apnews.com/article/us-news-nutrition-coronavirus-pandemic-d1e17ef502ab92bd41216c90ac60ba5f