The National Council on Aging (NCOA), the national voice for every person’s right to age well, has received a $250,000, one-year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to examine what contributes to high enrollment rates of older adults in benefits programs in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and Duval County, Texas.
Through this work, NCOA seeks to understand what is working in two counties that enroll exceptionally high percentages of older adults in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Medicare Savings Programs (MSP):
SNAP
SSI
MSP
“It’s heartbreaking to see that millions of eligible older adults who could really use this help are not enrolled in these programs,” said Ramsey Alwin, NCOA president and CEO. “We want to see what these two counties have done to generate such high enrollment rates, so other counties and states can replicate their success together with local providers and federal policymakers.”
SNAP helps participants afford food, SSI provides monthly cash assistance for older adults and people with disabilities and the MSPs help people with Medicare pay for their health care costs. Often, these programs can be the difference between an older adult having to choose between food or medicine each month.
NCOA will produce and disseminate a best-practices report with recommendations for county, state and federal policymakers as well as community-based organizations, which they can use to help more older adults enroll in public benefits programs.
NCOA’s Benefits Participation Map, an interactive tool that shows county-level data for enrollment in these key programs, reveals wide variations across counties when it comes to how many eligible older adults are receiving these valuable benefits. Nationwide, almost 9 million eligible older adults are not enrolled in SNAP, 2.3 million are not enrolled in SSI, and almost 5.8 million are not enrolled in MSP.
The map shows that St. Johns County has a SNAP participation rate of 19.5% and 6,273 eligible nonparticipants. It’s SSI participation rate is 33.6%. It’s MSP participation rate is 26.8%, with 4,673 eligible nonparticipants.
The map shows that Duval County has a SNAP participation rate of 44.4% and 22,505 eligible nonparticipants. It has a 44.2% SSI participation rate with 6,988 eligible nonparticipants, and it has a 56.8% MSP participation rate with 12.550 eligible nonparticipants.
“The effectiveness of the social safety net in reducing hardship depends to no small degree on adequate outreach and the simplification of enrollment,” said Katherine Hempstead, senior policy adviser, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “We are excited to support NCOA in its effort to lift up best practices to increase take-up of important benefits among older adults.”
Learn more at www.ncoa.org and @NCOAging.
