LAUSR

The increasing recognition of social and economic factors as fundamental to health and health disparities has dramatically broadened the topics, levels of analysis, and interventions considered relevant to public health and medicine. The article by Shafer and colleagues 1 is an excellent example of this broader orientation. The authors examined the short-term associations of giving most US families with children an advanced monthly payment on a substantial tax credit with food insufficiency. Household food insufficiency, defined as not having enough to eat, is a material hardship associated with many adverse health outcomes. The policy they studied, the Child Tax Credit (CTC), was not designed to address food insufficiency or health per se but to offset the substantial costs of providing children with high-quality housing, nutrition, education, and more. The authors found that the first CTC payment—ranging from $250 to many times that, depending on the number and ages of children—was associated with a 26% reduction in food insufficiency nationally among households with children. 1