Making sure that people in our communities don’t go hungry is the right thing to do—the right thing for the government to do, specifically, to express that not going hungry is a right rather than an individual gift. It also makes economic sense, because when people have unhealthy, insecure diets, their health suffers. Here's a powerful example of that:
Toward the end of every month, hospitals in California see a curious uptick in admissions for hypoglycemia, the kind of low blood sugar that can affect diabetics. The pattern, detected in a recent study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, is almost entirely driven by low-income patients. The non-poor don't show much change in admissions at all.
The researchers suspect this trend may point to an underlying challenge for the poor: Food stamps, given out in a lump sum at the start of each month, run out for many families before they reach the end of it.
And when your food starts running out, and you eat less because you can’t afford to eat enough, it can affect your health. Like by making you 27 percent more likely to go to the hospital for hypoglycemia at the end of the month than at the beginning. That takes a long-term toll on people’s health, and it’s not cheap, either. This study is also not the first indication we’ve had of such patterns. A 2013 analysis of planned food stamp cuts predicted that increased costs from diabetes would equal any savings from cutting nutrition assistance for five million people, and a historical study showed that food stamps improved children's health and educational outcomes when they were introduced in the 1960s and 1970s.
Not that the Republican politicians who are always pushing to cut nutrition assistance programs care about any of this.