The Food Stamp Program (FSP, known since 2008 as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) is one of the largest safety-net programs in the United States. It is especially important for families with children. However, the FSP eligibility of documented immigrants has shifted on multiple occasions in recent decades. When I studied the health outcomes of children in documented immigrant families affected by such shifts between 1996 and 2003, I found that just one extra year of parental eligibility before age 5 improves health outcomes at ages 6-16. This suggests that expanding food-stamp access for such families has lasting long-run benefits for their children and may help to reduce public medical expenditures in the medium term.
Key Facts
- Immigrants’ loss of eligibility reduced participation in the Food Stamp Program among U.S.-born children of immigrants by 50%, and reduced the average benefits they received by 36%.
- Loss of parental food-stamp eligibility before age five has clear negative effects on developmental health outcomes and on parental reports of the child’s health in the medium-run.
- An additional year of food-stamp access in early life reduces medical expenditures in the medium-run by roughly $140 per child.
In 2011, 25 percent of all children in the U.S. and nearly 15 percent of the total population received benefits from the FSP.[1] Measured as their cash equivalent, FSP benefits reduced the poverty rate among participants by 16 percent that year.[2] For policymakers and economists, the program’s positive contributions to family nutrition and well-being must be squared with its direct costs. Concerns over increased spending resulted in several cuts to food-stamp generosity in the past several years[3], with potentially larger cuts on the horizon—especially for immigrants.[4,5]
[For more on this story by Chloe N. East, go to https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/po...ces-medical-spending]
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