Covington said the local Meals on Wheels program doesn’t get a large amount of money from the federal government.
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He estimates at least 30 Onondaga County seniors are already on a wait list because federal funding hasn’t kept pace with the increasing need to serve healthy meals to a growing, aging population. “That’s how it happens here in Lubbock”. Sometimes, for some seniors, a volunteer from Meals on Wheels may be the only person they see in a day.
“The state has taken a look at what percentage of people they think that we can help throughout the entire state”, Kaufman said. “We can provide a senior with Meals on Wheels for an entire year for roughly the same cost of an average one-day stay in the hospital or ten days in a nursing home”. Democratic Congressman Mark Takano of Riverside tweeted that the program feeds 500,000 veterans every year.
In what could be an ugly budget battle, a program that provides meals to thousands of homebound seniors seems like an unlikely target. I think it’s safe to say that by literally delivering meals, they’re delivering on on that promise.
Meals on Wheels also said people used the Twitter hashtag #MealsOnWheels or mentioned the organization on Twitter about 9,000 times an hour on Thursday.
It is too soon to tell how the proposed cuts would impact specific Meals On Wheels programs. “But when we get into appropriations, Meals on Wheels is a wonderful program”.
While Donald Trump’s bogus claim about former President Barack Obama allegedly having Trump Tower wiretapped still won’t die, the American Health Care Act and other money matters are beginning to flare up.
While Meals on Wheels relies heavily on donations, that’s offset by federal funding from the Older Americans Act, which is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services and accounts for 35 percent of the program’s total funding.
Despite the budget proposal, a top Trump supporter in NY said Thursday he’ll make the sure program continues to receive federal aid.
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Other popular programs that would lose funding under the proposal include PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Chemical Safety Board. It would effect a number of individuals and I don’t know what the answer would be to try and help them if they did not have this.
