Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2020

Floor Speech

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of my amendment to H.R. 2740, which will ensure that seniors have access to medically-tailored meals, a proven intervention that improves health and drives down costs.

Two of the most difficult issues to combat in healthcare are, one, managing chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes; and, two, addressing social determinates of health like hunger and poverty.

The statistics are shocking. Eighty percent of older Americans have at least one chronic disease, 77 percent have at least two chronic diseases, and 5 million seniors in our country face hunger.

That is where medically-tailored meals come in.

These meals are customized to address a person's specific healthcare needs. Think of a heart-healthy meal for a heart disease patient or a low-sugar one for a diabetic.

These meals not only help reduce the reliance on costly pharmaceuticals, they can help lower overall healthcare costs, improve health, and alleviate hunger.

Take a study done by the Massachusetts Commonwealth Care Alliance, which showed that people receiving medically-tailored home-delivered meals had fewer ER visits and fewer hospital readmissions.

That saves the consumer on copays and out-of-pocket costs. It saves the hospital and insurance provider, like Medicare, even more on needless emergency room visits and costly hospital stays.

My amendment does a very simple thing: it will ensure that the Administration for Community Living, which oversees senior nutrition programing, funds programs for medically-tailored meal delivery.

Mr. Chairman, medically-tailored meals improve health outcomes, they lower costs, and they are just smart policy. I encourage my colleagues to vote ``yes''.

Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Maine (Ms. Pingree), who has been a leader on this and so many other issues regarding food and nutrition.

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Mr. Chairman, as the gentlewoman from Maine stated, I cochair the Food is Medicine working group, along with Ms. Pingree, who is on it, and my colleague from Kansas, Roger Marshall, and I want to thank them for their work on these issues. I also want to thank Katie Porter, who is also a cosponsor of this amendment.

The bottom line is this is common sense.

Mr. Chair, I want to also acknowledge the great work being done on this issue at the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School and the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts.

Mr. Chair, I want to acknowledge groups like Community Servings, which is in my district, which administers medically-tailored meals, as well as Food & Friends here in Washington, D.C., and the Food is Medicine Coalition.

The bottom line is this not only is good for patients and can help improve healthcare outcomes for individuals and in some cases literally save lives, but it also will save a boatload of money.

As I mentioned earlier, when you are readmitted to a hospital prematurely, that hospital gets punished, the insurance company has to kick in again, you have to pay more out-of-pocket expenses.

Mr. Chair, we can do this better. We need to think differently about how we approach healthcare. This is one way to do it.

Mr. Chair, again, I urge everybody to support this amendment. I hope it receives broad bipartisan support.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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