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Food stamp cuts hit 9 million elderly and disabled people

07 November 2013 02:03 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Nearly one in seven Americans uses the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which has doubled in cost since 2008 when Congress increased the benefits as part of the economic stimulus bill. Both Democrats and Republicans allowed the temporary benefits boost to expire on Nov. 1, and Republicans are pushing for far steeper cuts to the $80 billion program, APA reports quoting news.yahoo.com.

The average monthly decrease for a one-person household is $11. That doesn’t sound like much, but the vast majority of food stamp recipients say the assistance runs out in the first three weeks of each month, leaving them to cobble together food from other sources in the final week. The cuts amount to 16 meals a month for the average family of three, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Thrifty Food Plan.

“Even though it might sound little, for some people that’s a couple of meals that they have to choose whether they eat or don’t eat,” said Bobbie Sackman, the director of public policy at the Council of Senior Centers and Services in New York City, which helps elderly people sign up for assistance. “They have to go elsewhere to find food or they’re not going to have food.”

People can turn to food pantries for additional assistance. But it’s harder for older and disabled people to fill in the gaps left by the food stamp program, since going in-person to various soup kitchens and food pantries is not an option for many of them. About 9 percent of all food stamps go to households that include senior citizens. In New York, which has a large elderly population, it’s double that.

Marc Wolfson, a disabled 62 year-old who lives in Brooklyn, spent his Tuesday afternoon calling around to various food pantries to see if any of them would deliver meals to his apartment.

One food pantry, called “God’s Love We Deliver,” told him they could drop off groceries at his apartment, but only on days when Wolfson is undergoing dialysis for his kidney disease. So the pantry had to turn him down. “They ain’t delivering it to me,” Wolfson joked.

Wolfson has diabetes and anemia, so his diet must be low in sugar and carbohydrates and high in iron-rich foods like red meat. The first two weeks, Wolfson can manage that diet on food stamps, but then the money runs out. “The doctors want me to eat all protein,” he said. “The last two weeks the only protein I’m getting is eggs.”