I'm not saying this doctor's suggestion is the only or best solution, but it is nice to see the issue get noticed. Excerpts from the Op/Ed:
This 30-year-old patient told me that she had struggled with her weight for years. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she had finally lost weight by eating more proteins and vegetables. Her food budget was supplemented by federal food programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as well as the stimulus money she received during the pandemic.
In recent years, however, as her career grew, so did her income, making her ineligible to qualify for federal assistance programs, such as SNAP. At the same time, the pandemic stimulus money disappeared. As a result of both factors, her supplementary incomes and support for food withered.
While screening for food insecurity is now a routine part of what we do in primary care, fixing the problem is impossible without also addressing the upstream causes. This patient’s food insecurity stemmed from not only the “cliff effect” of losing her supplemental benefits when her earnings pushed her out of a certain income bracket but also from the rising cost of food prices, including high-protein foods such as eggs and beef, given the rise of bird flu. The incidence of viruses able to spread from one species to another (called “viral spillover”) in the face of climate change is predicted to become more and more common in the coming years — all of which place a higher price tag on food.
I know that writing a prescription for weight-loss drugs is far easier for me and my colleagues than trying to address the real cost of rising food prices and food insecurity.
State and federal policy makers must begin by urgently addressing and mitigating the “cliff effect” for those who are making a livable wage.
Politicians are notoriously evasive, and this particular interview sounded more straight forward than most. Okay, most the honest ones, anyway. I mean: it's easy to say "Read my lips. No new taxes" or "Free IVF" if you've no legitimate plan to fund the government, but if you're not going to make stuff up for the sound bite, you almost have to be evasive. Robust and well considered plans are made by experts and a politician trying to promote a good plan has to boil it down to a couple nebulous basics. Doing anything else means you either bore the audience OR skip a contingency or other minutia such that your critics call you a liar.
Remember when Obama said you'd get to keep your doctor? He was trying to summarize explaining that Affordable Care would not mandate what doctor you could use, but what he didn't say was that Insurance Companies would continue to be able choose what doctors they covered, so Obama's critics said he LIED about keeping your doctor. It was NOT a lie. It was just Insurance companies doing what they always did.
Harris said she would support Israel but the war had to end. If Israeli/Palestinian strife has gone unsolved for 50 years through all sorts of Presidents, I don't expect any U.S. election to change what goes on over there. The U.S. could theoretically stop aiding Israel as it commits genocide, but the realistic outcome of that would be neighboring countries committing genocide on Israelis, and since that's the basic reason the country was invented... maybe that's not the best outcome either. It has been a mess for decades, and I'm not blaming Regan, Carter, Trump, Putin, or Tony Blair for any of the mess with Gaza.
Harris said she would not ban fracking but her values have not changed. I suspect this is because she's come to see no one banned horses when car came along, and no one need ban fracking if there's a better alternative. What she did not specify was the carrots and sticks she might employ to get us to which alternatives. That's fine with me because the tech is changing and the outcome is more important than the method.
Harris said she would enforce laws regarding immigration AND she wanted the tabled border bill on her desk so she can sign it. There's a bunch she could have said there, too, but my point is that again, she wasn't particularly evasive.