Axios Event: Improving access to nutritious food is a health care issue, nonprofit leader says

WASHINGTON – Speakers highlighted their efforts to remove barriers for Americans to access healthy foods and affordable care at an Axios event on June 10.

Axios' Nathan Bomey and Victoria Knight spoke with About Fresh co-founder and CEO Josh Trautwein, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) at the event, sponsored by Flex Association.

Why it matters: Many Americans face barriers to achieving a healthy diet. The connection between food and chronic conditions is a top health policy priority of the Trump administration.

What they're saying: Trautwein is trying to reduce those barriers by integrating food access into the health care system with his nonprofit About Fresh. "There's an enormous amount of innovation happening within that broad ecosystem of food as medicine," he said.

• The nonprofit's Fresh Connect program aims to have health care providers and insurance plans cover the costs of healthy food for users under a "food prescription."
• "It's a debit card that can be programmed with item-level spend parameters based on a patient's health profile, that allows health plans and providers and community-based organizations to cover the cost of healthy food at more than 13,000 grocery stores across the country," he said. "It's a lot like EBT, but just for health care."

Zoom in: Trautwein is now focused on implementing the program and ensuring accuracy across approved product and spending lists.

• Eventually, he hopes to advance legislation expanding Medicaid financing for food as medicine, which he acknowledges would be a challenging process.
• "We know that food is responsible for about a trillion dollars a year of adverse economic impact, and hundreds of billions a year in direct health care costs," he said. "So our effort is to recruit health care as an investor into that mission – really as a fiscal imperative."

Driving the news: The health care issues now dominating federal budget debates on Capitol Hill include Medicaid spending, prescription benefit manager (PBM) reform and drug pricing in general.

• Miller-Meeks has been a long-time advocate for PBM reform as a way to lower prescription drug prices. "You want to have a robust pharmaceutical marketplace, but you also want to have affordable medications," she said. "Looking at the vertical integration, I think, is absolutely necessary, and the FTC is finally doing that."
• Access to health insurance is a top concern among her constituents in Colorado, DeGette said, adding that "the Medicaid expansion is important."

• "The new CBO study shows that 16 million people will lose their health care if the Republican agenda goes through – both the Medicaid cuts and also the tax credit expires at the end of the year," DeGette said, adding that a large number of those people are in rural areas.

Content from the sponsored segment:

In a View From the Top conversation, Sarah Fleisch, Instacart senior director of policy research and development, and Christine Campigotto, Lyft director of policy impact and operations, explained how both companies are leveraging partnerships with local organizations to connect communities with healthy food and transportation to health care appointments.

• "I think a core part of online grocery and the ability to order groceries and have them delivered is about overcoming barriers that people face in their lives," Fleisch said. "That could be barriers to transportation … mobility barriers, family caregiving barriers making it harder for people to leave home, to go to stores that offer nutritious options."