Could prescription vegetables be the future of healthcare?
The authors of a new study conclude that healthful food prescriptions in Medicare and Medicaid would be more cost-effective after 5 years than preventive drug treatments.
Medicare and Medicaid are the two largest healthcare programs in the United States.
Approximately 57 million people received coverage from Medicare plans in 2016, while Medicaid had about 66 million enrollees in 2018.
Medicare is the federal health insurance program that supports certain groups of people, including those who are 65 years or older, those with permanent kidney failure, and some younger people with disabilities.
Medicaid is a federal and state program that helps people who have limited income and resources.
Medicare accounted for 15 percent of the federal budget in 2017. As the population ages and healthcare costs rise, experts estimate that healthcare spending will continue to grow. According to projections, Medicare spending will reach 18 percent by 2028.
Encouraging people to eat better
A team of researchers from Tufts University and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA analyzed the effects of healthful food prescriptions in Medicare and Medicaid. The study, which the journal PLOS Medicine published, found that offsetting the cost of healthful foods by 30 percent through health insurance would improve health and reduce costs.
According to the co-first author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts:
"Medicare and Medicaid are the two largest healthcare programs in the U.S., together covering one in three Americans and accounting for 1 in every 4 dollars in the entire federal budget."
The researchers modeled two different scenarios that would play out if Medicare and Medicaid covered 30 percent of healthful food purchases.
In both scenarios, these programs would cover 30 percent of fruit and vegetable purchases. However, in the second scenario, they would also cover 30 percent of purchases of whole grains, nuts, seafood, and plant oils.
The findings showed that the first scenario would prevent about 1.93 million cases of heart disease, while the second one would prevent close to 3.28 million cases of heart disease as well as 120,000 cases of diabetes.
The positive effect on diabetes is due to the role that whole grains, nuts, and seeds play in diabetes prevention.
"We found that encouraging people to eat healthy foods in Medicare and Medicaid — healthy food prescriptions — could be as or more cost-effective as other common interventions, such as preventative drug treatments for hypertension or high cholesterol," says Yujin Lee, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedman School and co-first author of the study.
