Incentivizing healthy eating could have big payoff for Medicaid, Medicare

Dive Brief:

• Helping adults on Medicare and Medicaid afford healthy foods could be a cost-effective tactic to improve population health, a study published in PLOS Medicine suggests.
• The researchers simulated the impact of a 30% subsidy on either fruits and vegetables or a broader array of healthful foods on four measures: incidence of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, quality-adjusted life years (a measure of disease burden), health-related costs and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios.
• Use of the F&V incentive resulted in 1.93 million fewer CVD events, added 4.64 QALYS and saved $39.7 billion in formal healthcare costs. The healthy foods incentive prevented 3.28 million CVD events as well as 120,000 diabetes cases, gained 8.40 million QALYS and lopped $100.2 billion...

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