He’s 65+, not disabled.
I haven’t had to specify “debit” or “credit” to a person in years - there’s a button - and EBT cards ( in my state) require a PIN so just like a debit card. Maybe some small mom and pop still asks but not large supermarkets ( again, in my state)
The same way they know to tax my laundry detergent but not my food - the computers know which items are which. Again, might be different in a small store.
But I just want to say that while some things seem ridiculous (why can I pay for this sandwich with food stamps if it’s cold , but not if it’s toasted?) , a lot of that comes down to the intersections of rules and it’s unintentional. There isn’t actually a rule that cold sandwiches are fine but not toasted ones. It’s a combination of “Benefits can be used for any food not specifically excluded” and “Can’t be used for prepared hot food”.
BTW Seeds to grow vegetables and plants that provide food, such as basil or tomato can be purchased with SNAP benefits.
Social Security retirement funds are just cash. You can spend them on whatever you like.
SNAP funds are not usually cash, though you may get a cash benefit. Your spending is restricted to certain categories.
Where I shop the card reader is on the customer’s end. You swipe (or poke), choose enter your pin, choose credit, debit, or EBT, all without the cashier actually seeing it. (The first time I used one of those I thought EBT was debit, so that’s what I chose and it went through. Even though I wasn’t on EBT and only learned what it meant later. So I apparently somehow accidentally robbed the store and the system didn’t stop me.)
Then, to take my speculation a step further <grin> …
He could – to @doreen 's point – be a Medicare Advantage recipient, using UnitedHealthCare’s plan.
That offers $72/month to be used on OTC products, healthy food, or utility bills (4-page PDF).
If my speculation is right, then – IMHO – it seems like even less of a transgression worth any of us looking down our noses at.
ETA: I may have pulled the wrong policy. That one may be for the combination of Medicare and Medicaid. This one looks like Medicare only, offering – instead – $45/month to be used on OTC products and healthy food.
Either way…
I’ve seen things like this. I volunteered at a community pantry one time that was set up to try to divert about-to-be-wasted food from supermarkets, to people who were struggling with their household budgets. Occasionally we’d get people passing by the place commenting on how well-dressed some of our customers appeared to be. Turns out it’s quite common for people accepting food from food banks and pantries to dress up in their best outfit in the hope of offsetting a sense of shame about the situation.
I don’t think it’s a great idea to try to magnify that shame by supervising their choices more than we already do.
Makes sense. I guess I was implicitly thinking in terms of supermarkets here in Canada where we don’t have such things as special EBT cards and the grocery categorizations don’t distinguish, say, between hot or cold prepared foods. But I guess in the US the systems have to be built to distinguish between EBT-eligible and non-eligible. Here, the only necessary distinction is between non-taxable items (most basic groceries) and everything else including prepared foods and non-groceries.
And I reiterate again that in my view the idea of any food item being non-eligible for EBT is asinine.
I admit my error and stand corrected.
I think that EBT is just a category. You may have had a problem had you tried to buy tequila that day. Or maybe not, who knows? The system should be able to tell.
I thought more like this
Would it be appropriate in this thread to bring up people on SNAP having limited choices due to food deserts and/or gentrification?
“How dare you buy organic 100% durum semolina pasta. There is cheaper stuff.”
“Not anywhere local to me.”
OR
“You need to use your SNAP to buy fresh healthy fruit.”
“I’d love to but THE store didn’t have any non-rotted fruit.”
No.
Discourse
2 posts were split to a new topic: The entire ‘Food Stamp’ program in it’s various forms is a subsidy to help farmers by keeping demand high
This topic was automatically opened after 11 minutes.
Heh. I have bought old, long sleeve dress shirts from a thrift shop that I wear doing outside work in the summer (vitiligo). I purposely “dress down” when I shop there. Offsetting shame works both ways?
“Dual health plan” is a Medicare Advantage plan specifically for people who are also on Medicaid. I don’t know of any plan that gives such benefits to people who are on Medicaid only or Medicaid + Traditional Medicare.
There are some Medicaid plans (Kansas “Kancare” managed health plans, e.g.) that give an allowance to purchase certain health-related items: for example, the Aetna Kancare plan allows any participant to purchase $25/month from a catalog containing toothpaste, incontinence products, vitamins, sunscreen, aspirin, etc. This same plan gives gift cards to members to complete wellness activities, such as $25 for getting your flu shot.
At least in my state, the EBT card looks like a debit or credit card (a proposal to make a distinctive color so it would stand out failed several years ago), but when it is swiped the cashier will know. The cashier is also able to look up your available balance, so for example if you’ve got $20.35 left on your card and a grocery bill of $37.29, the cashier can split the payment. The card terminal will also ask whether you are using food or cash benefits (the latter mostly Temporary Assistance for Needy Families [TANF], which replaced AFDC in the 1990s).
The computer knows. Every product in the store has to be coded as SNAP-eligible or not, and also WIC-eligible or not, which sales tax rate applies, etc. That does mean that if the store sells some product both heated and cold (e.g., rotisserie chicken), those have to be under two separate item codes. Almost all retailers are required to purchase EBT equipment and transaction services and have a system that can apply the SNAP restrictions to purchases in order to be able to accept EBT purchases.
Yes, thank you, I had pretty much already concluded that. But reading that description does raise the question about the total economic cost of all this, from issuing the EBT cards in the first place to all the costs involved in processing them and categorizing all the food products. The alternative being to simply add the food allowance to whatever other social assistance the individual may already be receiving.
It’s such an obvious and simple solution, but I guess some ideologues have their shorts in a knot because someone, somehow, in some way they can’t really articulate, may get an “undeserved” benefit from it. It’s basically the same (mostly unspoken) argument they have against UHC – sure, it will greatly reduce their health care costs and provide reliable unconditional coverage, but “undeserving” lazy layabouts would get it, too, and that’s just intolerable!
My Medicare Advantage plan gives me OTC benefits of $75 per quarter, I order from a special section on the CVS website that only contains the qualified products. I frequently joke about my Medicare lube.
I think there could be an argument that food assistance is generally designated for children, and specifying that it has to be spent on food makes it more likely that more food will end up in the house. In the same way, if someone is in an abusove situation where money is likely to be stolen, food stamps make it more likely they will at least have access to food.
Obviously, this is imperfect. You can sell foodstamps and stuff. But it makes it harder for your alcoholic SO to take the food stamps budget and spend it on booze. Not every abusive person is super organized.
I genuinely have no idea how widespread that sort of thong is, or if it is worth the significant negatives that come with it. But there is an argument that its appropriate to make sure everyone has access to food, specifically.
If they tried to replace free school lunch with a subsidy sent to parents from which the parents could pay for lunch, more kids would be hungry, I think. But others would have far better meals if they could make their own choices.