Medicaid meal deliveries reduce hospital visits and costs

About a dozen states offer “medically tailored meals” to people with conditions such as diabetes and heart disease who get their insurance through Medicaid. Such programs significantly improve the health of the people in them, according to a new study.

Medically tailored meals are fully prepared, home-delivered meals that are customized by a registered dietitian nutritionist for people with diet-linked conditions like diabetes, heart failure or chronic kidney disease. They’re part of a broader category of “food is medicine” interventions that use free, healthy food to improve people’s health

The “food as medicine” movement has picked up steam in recent years, propelled by some in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement who share the philosophy of using nutrition to help prevent and manage chronic diseases.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has championed “food as medicine” and praised the potential of such programs to improve health and lower healthcare costs. However, Kennedy attracted criticism last year after praising one company that makes such meals for Medicaid and Medicare enrollees. The Associated Press reviewed the company’s offerings, finding the menu included the type of ultra processed foods high in sodium and sugar that Kennedy has often criticized.

Massachusetts was the first state to broadly offer medically tailored meals to Medicaid recipients with diet-related diseases, so researchers with Tufts University, the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and other groups focused their research on that state.

They found that enrollees in Massachusetts Medicaid who received medically tailored meals had 31% fewer hospitalizations and 20% fewer emergency department visits.

Per-person health costs declined by an average of $3,433 while participants were in the program, which offset nearly all of the program’s cost to taxpayers.

More Americans are hungry in the face of federal cuts, rising grocery prices

“Our results show that food really is medicine, with major clinical and policy implications for health-insurance coverage of medically tailored meals to impact diet-related diseases and healthcare costs,” said the report’s senior author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of Tufts University’s Food is Medicine Institute, in a June statement announcing the findings.

Medicaid, the federal-state public health insurance for people with low incomes, has increasingly given states flexibility to launch medical meal programs. Poor diet is a leading cause of death, disability and the use of emergency health services, researchers noted.

States offering medically tailored meals include California, Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington.

States face tight timeline as feds unveil new Medicaid work requirement rules

Researchers in the Massachusetts study found that the program not only improved health outcomes, but also yielded significant cost savings for the state’s Medicaid program, even when accounting for the cost of the meals, for people with certain conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and depression.

While the research was limited to one state with meals delivered by one established nonprofit provider, the study’s authors were hopeful the findings could help guide other states considering similar programs.

“It’s rare to find anything in medicine that both improves health and saves money,” Mozaffarian said in June. “It should be a no-brainer to extend similar programs to patients in other states and covered by other health insurance programs, such as Medicare and employer-based insurance.”

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at [email protected].