Modern corporations spend billions to promote consumer products most the world cannot afford, and yet, parts of the American populace continue to go hungry, without basic health coverage or the ability to stay afloat much less earn a decent living wage.
A growing number of American “have-nots” lack the benefits of proper nutrition, stable income or education, thereby diminishing a large percentage of the population’s overall good health, which can then in turn bloat national healthcare costs for all of us. Benefit programs are bridges that provide access to the basics that mitigates risk and future complications.
This idea is a painful cultural metaphor, and an excruciating reality threatening the livelihood of American individuals and families going needlessly without. Benefit programs create proactive opportunity for disadvantaged Americans to reinvent productive and self-reliant lives.
In the 1980’s, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under Ronald Regan created Lifeline Assistance, which serves low-income and at-risk populations through aids like Food Stamps that help span the financial gap and feed American families between paychecks that aren’t enough to live on.
More than 60 million disabled, low-income and diverse American populations including women are able to access essential health coverage, nutrition and financial assistance through federal benefit programs, even those who may already be enrolled in a government benefit program, have a pre-existing condition, or those who meet state specified income criteria.
Basic math says a static minimum wage cannot keep up with rising living costs. As such, expanding the effectiveness of benefit programs becomes a crucial concern for vulnerable American communities.
And so, as the Internet becomes the Internet of Things, and we grow increasingly interconnected, a host of ways to expand the effectiveness of benefit programs becomes viable.
Modernizing the infrastructure of benefit delivery systems through the Internet of Things would go a long way toward simplifying enrollment procedures and achieving measurable standards and criteria while dramatically reducing energy waste.
I think it would maximize benefit effectiveness using the Internet to update and streamline existing telecomm and community-based services through easy-to-use, simple language websites that any 10 year old or grandparent would understand.
My hope for the future of federal Benefit Programs working to make Americans stronger lies with an open Internet because by its very nature, the Internet of Things provides an example for how to better manage the delivery maintenance and dispersal of existing benefit systems.
In the March / April 2014 Council on Foreign Affairs article, As Objects Go Online, The Promise (and Pitfalls) of the Internet of Things, MIT Director of The Center for Bits and Atoms, Neil Gershenfeld, and Cisco Fellow, J.P. Vasseur suggest a world of wider potential and greater efficiency through the Internet of Things:
