There are stories of doctors prescribing food to malnourished children and Medicaid refusing to pay, saying "Food is not medicine."

That makes sense to me since there are other programs which exist specifically to provide food assistance.

Although that point of view appears to miss the point. It appears the inability to pay for food with the health budget would hide / obfuscate the data that might have otherwise shown a direct correlation between malnutrition and poor health.

Sure you could read a study to get the same information, but unless your own data screams to you what the problem is it's not always easy to convince folks you should be doing anything about it.

I don't blame the bureaucrat who denied this claim. While food is clearly required for your health, and there is a strong connection between healthy diet and general and specific health issues, including death, pharmacies don't dispense food. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that insurance would approve supplements, not food, for malnutrition since that is something traditionally associated with health care.

What would you say if the family was providing unhealthy food, and the doctor prescribed a year of vegetables from Medicaid? I agree, that would be a great program, but federal agencies can only do what they're specifically allowed to by law. I would imagine there is much data gathered on what conditions Medicare patients are suffering from, and i presume if malnutrition is common, that would be addressed in agency reports and in congress.

I'm not sure what data you're envisioning 'screaming' to responsible parties or what method they would be encountering this data by.

Depending on the age of the child, those programs may only provide food for a certain amount of time, over the lifetime of the adult applying for the benefits.

Or, if the adult has any property that increases their net worth over a certain amount, then they can't get the benefit at all.

That's true. But the appropriate programs should be created, budgeted, or extended to provide food appropriately, not to somehow mix basic daily nutrition with doctors, insurance and pharmacies.

If they found a medical relationship is more effective, great. But the answer is to budget and create appropriate rules for that first.