It’s NOT Just SCHIP - The Heat or Eat Dilemma
Tue Oct 23, 2007 at 01:36:16 PM PDT
Yesterday in the Boston Globe, there was a good OpEd piece by Joseph P. Kennedy II and Dr. Deborah Frank pointing out the connection between malnutrition and the struggle of poor families to keep their homes warm in winter.
THE ALL-TOO-THIN baby on the pediatric exam table does not know that oil prices recently topped $80 a barrel. With almost no fat on his malnourished body, he is unable to tolerate for even a brief period being undressed by his doctor. His mother wonders how she will keep the house warm, food cooked, and lights on through the coming winter for the boy and his sister, while making sure that they have enough to eat.
This dilemma is happening all over the country, everywhere that experiences cold temps in the winter. Families who are already struggling to figure out where their next meal is coming from now have to figure out where their next gallon of heating oil will come from.
Federal research shows that while both rich and poor families increase their expenditures on home fuel during the winter, poor families offset this cost through decreasing food purchases, with an average 10 percent decrease in caloric intake. Parents know that children can freeze to death more quickly than they starve to death, and so most decrease food purchases first to pay for heat. Many inevitably sacrifice on both fronts, living with food scarcity while heating their homes with cooking stoves and space heaters, both of which dramatically increase the risk of fires, burns, and carbon monoxide poisoning.
Making the choice between food and heat has severe consequences for anyone – the elderly are often forced to make the same decision between food and heat (or air conditioning in the summer). But babies and toddlers are even more vulnerable because they lose body heat more rapidly than older children and adults because of their higher surface area-to-mass ratio. Diverting scarce calories to maintain body heat they jeopardize their health and growth as well as their future ability to learn and relate to others, says Frank and Kennedy.
Some here (many?) may know that Joe Kennedy II is chairman and president of Citizens Energy Corp., which he started in 1979 to meet the energy needs of the poor and elderly. The Federal program, Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, helps pay the winter heating bills or summer cooling bills of low-income and elderly people. During extreme weather conditions, people living in poverty and low-income elderly often have to choose between buying fuel to heat or cool their homes and buying food for themselves and their families. Since two-thirds of the families receiving LIHEAP assistance have incomes of less than $8,000 a year, the program clearly helps the people who need help the most.
The choice to heat and not eat means that when it gets cold in winter, hospitals face an epidemic of children who are underweight – a 30% increase in the coldest months as compared to other times of the year. (Of course, with SHCIP essentially being cut, will parents even be able to take their children to see a doctor?) A warm home, with the help of LIHEAP, as well as a full belly can mean a 32% reduction in hospital visits. But with fuel costs rising, the amount of money LIHEAP grants to families has shrunk to only about half of what it costs for one tank of heating oil ($314 for the grant vs. $600 for the tank).
Kennedy and Frank ask:
So why aren't policy makers following the doctor's orders? Some tell us there is no money in the till; the Bush administration's proposed budget this year would cut LIHEAP by 44 percent compared with funding just two years ago. And yet, the federal government collected $10 billion dollars in royalties from oil and gas companies in fiscal 2006 - a small fraction of the $77 billion that oil and gas companies received from the sale of oil and gas produced from federal lands and waters. In addition, earlier this month, a Department of the Interior sale of offshore oil and natural gas leases in the Central Gulf of Mexico netted another $2.9 billion, the second highest sale in US offshore leasing history.
As with SCHIP, LIHEAP is a vital program for ensuring the health of children who are, even Republicans admit, our nation’s future. But what kind of future citizen will they be without growing strong and healthy in a home with both food on the table and warmth to enjoy it?
LIHEAP was to be fully funded at $5.1 billion, about half of what it costs to wage war for one week in Iraq. Increasing SCHIP would be about a month and a half in Iraq. If we can find the money for killing, death and destruction; if we can find the money to allow the oil companies to make obscene profits, why can’t we find it for the most vulnerable in our country.
With more resources than any other nation on earth, we owe it to all our children to provide fuel for a healthy future. Our children should not run on empty.
Permalink | 4 comments