Besides providing health care to millions, the Medicaid program helps recipients make healthier food choices, according to work UConn research recently published in the journal Health Economics.
UConn Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics Rigoberto Lopez, Rebecca Boehm now an economist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Xi He, now a post-doctoral researcher at the Iowa State University, were interested in investigating the impact on food decisions of Medicaid, a joint federal-state program that helps with medical care for people with limited income or resources. What they found is that, in states that expanded Medicaid coverage to include more people, people’s purchasing habits shifted from sugary sodas and other unhealthy beverages to water and other zero-calorie options.
“Besides the obvious benefit of subsidized health care, there is an additional spillover of the program in promoting a healthy diet by reducing one of the three evils of the American diet – sugar — which is bad in all respects, from calories to cancer to obesity,” Lopez says. “The program contributes not just to cover the treatment of patients but also in a more preventive way.”
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Image via Sean Flynn/University of Connecticut.