Last year, 211 families ran out of the extra, emergency assistance they are forced to rely on when the basic funding runs out. This year, more than ten times as many — 2,981 — have exhausted that emergency heating assistance. Rising fuel prices, growing unemployment and the sub-prime loan crisis make expanding the heating assistance program, also known as LIHEAP, even more pressing, said. Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Dr. Deborah Frank, a pediatrics professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, urged the senators to expand heating assistance from a child health and developmental standpoint, noting that babies will freeze to death before they will starve to death…“There is a medicine that is partially effective in protecting children from the current epidemic of energy insecurity and its costly consequences, not just in human suffering, but in medical and educational costs now and in the future,” Frank said. “That medicine is public energy assistance.”