Vision for Future WIC Program

WIC

Visions for the Future of WIC

The Women, Infants, and Children program run by the United States Department of Agriculture, better known by its acronym of WIC, provides a much needed service to specific populations of citizens that are in the most dire need for assistance with some of the fewest resources available to them. By providing Federal grants to the individual States that enable the States to offer supplemental food products, certain types of healthcare subsidies and referrals, and nutritional education for low-income pregnant women, mothers, and their children under the age of five, some of the basic survival needs of these populations are met in a manner that promotes better lifelong practices and self-reliance (WIC, 2012). The following paragraphs detail certain visions for how WIC might be changed in the future to provide even better and more necessary services along these same lines to a wider and larger groups of individual women, children, and families in need of assistance.

Sheer and absolute expansion of the WIC program is not called for and would likely not be desirable for a variety of reasons. While serving more women and children in need of nutritional and health support is of course ideal and a definite goal of future growth and development for the WIC program, simply trying to expand enrollment by easing or increasing eligibility requirements would lead to a host of practical problems that would ultimately limit the benefit and the efficacy of the program overall. There are some fairly tight restrictions on WIC eligibility for a reason, and any expansion of services must take into account the differences in expense that such an expansion would necessarily entail (WIC, 2012).

There are ways in which the eligibility requirements for WIC can be expanded to some degree in order to offer greater benefits to more people without placing an undue cost burden on the United States Department of Agriculture or the federal budget overall. Increasing the age of children eligible for WIC benefits from five to seven would incorporate many more children in the program and allow families to plan and shop in a more secure and consistent fashion than under the current eligibility requirements and guidelines (WIC, 2012). There are also already family size categories for different levels of benefits from the WIC program, as each child under the age of five as well as the mother is eligible for specific benefit levels; adjusting this in a manner that promotes better spending habits for the family as a whole rather than on a per-child basis along with expanding the age limit of eligible children could actually end up producing greater cost effectiveness and efficiency while also providing more services to a larger population of individuals and families in need (WIC, 2012). As the goal of the program is to create basic foundations of stable health through nutrition and limited medical initiatives, ensuring stability in the family unit rather than on an individual basis would seem to be ideal (WIC, 2012).