Medicaid is paying millions for salty, fat-laden ‘medically tailored’ cheeseburgers and sandwiches
Medicaid is paying millions for salty, fat-laden ‘medically tailored’ cheeseburgers and sandwiches
The billing of Medicaid for dishes loaded with sodium and saturated fat raises questions about government oversight of meal delivery programs for people with serious illnesses.
They’re marketed as healthy, “dietitian-approved” meals and delivered directly to the homes of people seriously ill from cancer, diabetes, or heart disease: a Jimmy Dean frozen sausage breakfast sandwich, biscuits and gravy, a cheeseburger.
These are among the offerings sold by an Idaho-based company, Homestyle Direct, which is paid millions of dollars each year by taxpayer-funded state Medicaid programs to deliver what the company calls medically tailored meals. The company, which advertises delivering 7.8 million meals annually, has menus catering to customers trying to manage their cancer and diabetes, as well as “heart healthy” and “renal friendly” dishes.
However, multiple nutrition experts told STAT that many of Homestyle Direct’s offerings fall far short of what they’d consider medically tailored meals, a class of foods that have been proven to help those suffering from diet-related conditions improve their health and stay out of the hospital. Most also don’t appear to meet new voluntary accreditation standards crafted by medically-tailored meal providers.
“Homestyle Direct to me doesn’t look like medically tailored meals at all — it doesn’t even look like generally healthy meals,” said Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.
If you are seriously ill then you can eat whatever you want. It doesn't matter what you eat when you will be dead in a few months anyway.
What is millions? 7.8 million meals / $4 million would be less than $1/meal which would be a great deal despite qualifying as millions. However if instead we are talking about $800 million those are very expensive meals.