Andy Harris, the anesthesiologist and Maryland congressman who voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and who decried masking and vaccination mandates during the pandemic, now wants to save children in low-income households from sugary soft drinks.
Harris, the seven-term Republican who chairs a House agriculture subcommittee, thinks people enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) should not be allowed to use food stamps to buy sugar-sweetened beverages.
It’s an old complaint — that SNAP subsidizes the purchase of unhealthy foods and drinks — and Harris revived it last week with an essay for realclearpolicy.com.
“Let’s be clear,” Harris wrote, “we are not calling for unhealthy foods to be banned by the federal government; we believe in free markets. But funneling billions of dollars to subsidize unhealthy food or beverages for children, and, in turn, increasing the risk of diabetes, is not an example of the freedom we all hold dear, or a responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”
It’s nice to know Dr. Harris cares. This is the same health professional who ran for office against the ACA and joined other House Republicans in voting frequently for Obamacare’s repeal. Had they succeeded, thousands of Marylanders — at least 70,000 of them in Harris’ district — would have been deprived of the affordable health insurance the law provided.
Harris was also an outspoken vaccine skeptic and masking critic while the coronavirus claimed the lives of more than 1.1 million Americans.
He sounds like a classic libertarian, praising the free market and demanding that the government stay out of our personal decisions. Except that Harris, who is staunchly opposed to abortion, wants the government to interfere with the deeply personal choices of women, and now he wants to tell working people who receive SNAP benefits they can’t buy Mountain Dew with food stamps.
“We hope,” Harris wrote, “that we can all agree on a simple, bipartisan solution that will save the lives of kids: no SNAP funding for sugar-added beverages and nonnutritious foods.”
There’s no disputing the increase in obesity, especially among children, caused in large measure by the consumption of unhealthy foods, starting with high-sugar beverages.
But it’s a national problem, not restricted to people whose low earnings make them eligible for a government program.
A decade ago, when the Department of Agriculture surveyed the SNAP purchases by food stamp recipients, it found that 9.3% of their grocery budgets went for sweetened beverages. Meanwhile, households that did not receive food stamps spent about 7.1% of budgets on sweet drinks.
So, if health is the concern, logic says Harris should support a ban on high-sugar drinks for everyone.
“If they want to ban soda because they think it’s bad for people, then that’s what they should do,” says Michael J. Wilson, director of the nonprofit Maryland Hunger Solutions. “But we shouldn’t say to low-income folks, who are getting by on an average of $6 per person per day — that’s what the SNAP benefit is now — ‘You’re getting such a measly benefit and oh, by the way, don’t spend it on this.’
“It is micromanaging and stigmatizing to the extreme. And we often hear this from the same members of Congress who, at every turn, try to take away health care from low-income folks, [who] want to cut Medicaid, want to cut Medicare, want to eliminate Obamacare.”
Wilson says there are other restrictions on food stamp purchases that he considers outdated.
“You can only buy food, so you can’t buy diapers,” he says. “You can’t buy menstrual products. You also can’t buy aspirin or cold medicine. We’re still operating in so many ways like it’s 1960. You can buy a frozen chicken at the grocery store, but you can’t buy a rotisserie chicken. You can buy a frozen pizza, but you can’t purchase a pizza slice. … If it’s your daughter’s birthday party, you could buy a birthday cake. Maybe Andy Harris wants to deny them that, too.”
One solution to reducing the consumption of sugary drinks is to tax them at a higher rate. Municipalities that did that found an almost immediate drop in sales of sweet beverages. In Philadelphia, for instance, an analysis of scanner data showed a drop of 38% within a year after a 1.5 cents-per-ounce tax went into effect.
Plus, there’s been a measurable move away from sugary drinks. A Harvard study examined the habits of thousands of people during the 13-year period ending in 2016. Published in 2020, the study showed a significant decrease in the consumption of sugary drinks by adults and children.
I realize it goes against the ridiculous Republican agenda to cut SNAP benefits at a time when food prices have risen, but if Dr. Harris really wants to improve health outcomes, he should support an increase in food stamps. “Most studies will show you that, if you give people more dollars, they buy healthier food because that’s what they can afford to do,” says Wilson.
He points to the Maryland Market Money program as an example. Funded with public and private donations, it provides a dollar-for-dollar match to food stamp recipients when they buy SNAP-eligible products (fruits, vegetables, dairy, eggs, meat, poultry, fish, baked goods) at one of 46 farmers markets and farm stands across the state.
In other words, it’s an incentive that rewards people for buying healthier food instead of punishing and stigmatizing them for buying bad stuff.
