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Health Insurance Linked to Healthy Grocery Purchases

Daniel Rich Galinson

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Based in Minnesota, Daniel Rich Galinson guides Solutran as a national account manager and provides a host of coordinated solutions in the retail ACH transaction sphere. Having pioneered an insurance-linked Healthy Savings program that provided discounts for nutritious grocery store purchases, Daniel Rich Galinson has a strong interest in developments in his field.

A May 2018 Forbes article brought attention to federal government moves to allow Medicare Advantage plans to broaden the scope of health-related supplemental benefits for covered individuals. These benefits can be condition specific, such as the purchase of air conditioners by those living with asthma.
They also extend to more general benefits such as home-delivered meals, medical appointment transportation, and healthy grocery purchases. The latter benefit would unlock new data for health-quality researchers to define effective evidence-based interventions around the matrix of health and food.
One Health Affairs study already completed has linked food program participation with a statistically significant reduction in overall medical spending. In addition to a 16 percent decrease in such spending among those enrolled in a medically-tailored meal program, there was a substantial reduction in inpatient hospital admissions, emergency transports, and ER visits.