In October 2014, USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) and the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) awarded a 3-year, $1.9 M grant to Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) to establish the USDA Behavioral Economics Center for Healthy Food Choice Research (BECR Center). BECR will conduct behavioral economics research to benefit the nutrition, food security and health of all Americans, with special emphasis on facilitating food choice behaviors that would improve the diets of SNAP participants and WIC participants and promote cost-effective program operations. As part of this grant, the BECR Center has funded the development of 5 conceptual white papers that explore innovative behavioral economic approaches to improve the food cost-management of the WIC program while maintaining program participation and effectiveness in promoting improved diets. These papers will be available in Spring 2016 on the BECR website at: https://becr.sanford.duke.edu/.
The first WIC Medicaid Study, published in 1991, found that every dollar spent on WIC services to low-income pregnant women saved $1.77 to $3.13 in Med- icaid cost during the first 60 days following delivery. This study will reexamine the impacts of WIC in today’s environment. It will examine the characteristics of Medicaid births and estimate the impact of WIC on the following prenatal and birth outcomes: 1) maternal health behaviors (prenatal care adequacy, smoking, weight gain), 2) birth outcomes (birth weight, gestational age, type of delivery, breastfeeding at discharge), 3) maternal risk factors (such as gestational diabetes and hypertension), and 4) Medicaid costs (delivery and newborn costs through 60 days and one year postpartum). Building on work conducted in North Carolina, the study will also examine health utilization and outcomes for children participating in WIC.
The electronic benefits transfer (EBT) study is designed to augment findings from the 2013 WIC Vendor Management Study, which satisfies Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act of 2010 (IPERA) requirements. The EBT sub-study provides a unique opportunity to closely examine compliance among vendors in states with an EBT system. The findings will help inform the design of the next national Vendor Management study, at which time all States will have moved to EBT systems.
This study will examine indicators of High-Risk WIC Vendors by identifying practices from other government and non-governmental programs in identifying high-risk vendors, developing and testing a micro-simulation model using WIC EBT data to identify high-risk WIC vendors, and identifying design specifications for a national WIC fraud detection system.
