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.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17483630

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.

  • @Bye
    2•1 month ago

    Because it’s prescribed, it’s approved by Medicaid. If they approved eating grass as a treatment for thyroid cancer, I’d also be pissed. People trust their healthcare system to help them, because not everyone can be an expert. So it’s reasonable to expect Medicaid to only approve things for payment if they promote health. The cheeseburgers in question do not.