The Real Hunger Games | The Nation

”We’re cutting the very basic needs of human beings at a time when we’re cutting healthcare costs,” says Christie Hinrichs, president of Tabitha Health Care Services, a meal provider in Lincoln, Nebraska. “We know the increase [in hunger] will be an increase in healthcare costs.” The sequester may save $11 million, but the Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch) calculates the government could spend nearly $500 million more in Medicaid payments to nursing homes as a result of the cuts. Malnutrition is one of the greatest contributors to costly hospital and nursing home admissions and readmissions. At the same time, Medicare is trying to reduce readmissions by penalizing hospitals that have too many patients returning. Many seniors on waiting lists have just come from the hospital and need food to help them heal. Without it, program directors say, they may return to the hospital. The current Beltway mindset, however, assumes that such perversities are perfectly reasonable. At a Senate subcommittee hearing two years ago, Rand Paul told witnesses, “The idea or notion that spending money in Washington somehow is saving money really flies past most of the taxpayers.” Paul’s solution: the “nobility of private charity.”

Seniors have always had to rely on charity. Even in the 1960s and ’70s, at the peak of federal funding, it was always assumed private funds would leverage federal and state dollars. But as the national commitment has shrunk and needs have swollen, programs have become more dependent on private funds, which don’t come close to filling the gap.

Last year the fundraising gala sponsored by Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland brought in $150,000, nowhere near the amount it needs to close its budget gap. “Fundraising is like spitting in the ocean,” says Barbara Levin, director of client services. “It can’t make up the money from the federal government.” Many funders don’t see hungry old people as compelling as hungry kids, says grants manager Toni Gianforti, adding, “Most funders prefer to do something a lot splashier.” That’s why you see customers signing their names on fliers pasted on the walls of Goodburger in New York City advertising that they “took a bite out of childhood hunger” with a portion of the price they paid for burgers and fries given to Share Our Strength’s Dine Out for No Kid Hungry campaign. That’s why you find the label, saying “Child Hunger Ends Here,” on Reddi-wip and Egg Beaters, made by ConAgra Foods, part of the company’s twenty-year campaign to wipe out hunger among children. Kids appeal to advertisers. Old people at the end of life do not.

Ashley McCumber, who heads Meals on Wheels of San Francisco, spends 75 percent of his time raising money to stay on top of increased demand. “This is not a mission where it’s hard to ask people for support,” he says. “The biggest challenge is getting them to understand how big we are and what we do.” When I reported on San Francisco’s program in 1998, there were 411 names on its waiting list. Today, there are about 100. “Between then and now, we were committed to making sure people were not on the list longer than thirty days,” McCumber told me.

Aggressive fundraising, which accounts for about 60 percent of the program’s budget (the rest comes from government agencies), has made that possible, and so have San Francisco’s chefs and wine makers. In April, the annual Star Chefs & Vintners Gala raised a record $2.1 million for homebound hungry seniors. And that has made it possible to increase the number of meals served from 623,000 in 2007 to about 1.2 million today. Still, despite the money pouring in, McCumber is uneasy about what that means. “Is it OK for the government to hand over its obligation to feed its people to the private sector?” he asked. “In most areas of the country, the dollar-for-dollar match from the private sector is not the same.” He means, of course, that richer programs like his can perhaps keep up with increasing need, but others, like the one in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, cannot. There, Barrie Hardin says, “we can’t raise $100,000 in our part of the state. We have no economic base. It’s difficult to get people to give.”

So in San Francisco, 89-year-old Levi Harper gets a noon meal, but in Wabbeseka, Arkansas (pop. 255), 86-year-old William Hart is on a waiting list. Both are African-Americans who picked cotton as kids, served in the Navy during World War II, held a variety of jobs during their working lives and now live alone. Harper hobbles along with a walker and spends most of his hours in a big mechanical chair. “I stopped using the stove eight or nine years ago,” he said. “I got so unsteady on my feet, I didn’t trust myself handling hot pots.” Hart has crippling arthritis and can barely walk. He tells me he prepares his meals depending on what’s in his kitchen. There wasn’t much. When I asked if he was hungry, he replied, “Yeah.” As if to prove he had food, he thrust into my hand some grocery receipts (a friend drives him to the store every three weeks). They show he spends no more than $100 on each trip.

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Home-delivered meal programs are emblematic of others born during the Great Society, victims of a relentless campaign in recent decades to malign government aid, cut spending and allow all responsibility for even the most basic needs to fall to the private sector. Meal program directors continue to plead their case to members of Congress, taking them on deliveries and demonstrating that meals are cost-effective and necessary for good health, but funding never really increases. In some ways the programs are victims of their own success: they’re so good at what they do that few pay attention to the growing need for their services. Kathy Pontin says the politicians in her service area, Representative Rosa DeLauro and Senator Richard Blumenthal, are supportive, but they tell her there’s not much they can do in a deadlocked Congress.

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The idea of giving a little bit more of the nation’s vast wealth to the elderly, especially those in dire need, has suffered in the drive by conservative think tanks to demonize old people—the “greedy geezer” meme. Last winter on the CBS Evening News, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who earned $26 million last year, said, “You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations—the entitlements and what people think they’re going to get. Because they’re not going to get it.” He was talking about Social Security and Medicare, but home-delivered meals are entitlements too; smaller Social Security checks and paying more for medical care means less money for food.

Meanwhile, when Michelle McDonald of the Central Maryland meals program checked back with the Eisenharts in July, she learned that the couple still could not pay privately for the one meal a day that was feeding both of them. “It’s pretty rough around here,” Arlan Eisenhart told her. McDonald asked what they were eating. “We’re not eating much of anything at all,” Arlan replied. “It’s pretty hard for me to stand up and make anything. I try the best I can. Sometimes the best isn’t good enough.”

Read Sasha Abramsky on “America’s Shameful Poverty Stats”—and don’t miss this week’s editorial on the House Republican effort to defund food stamps.