Most European countries have things like free medical care and maternity leave that we lack in the US.

It isn't really a comparable situation. Acting like it is doesn't do anything constructive for American problems.

Of course you can draw comparisons regarding access to food for the poor between those two continents.

Looking more at other countries is imho benelovant for the states.

I was a military wife for a lot of years. Trying to talk about the differences in compensation and lifestyle between the American military and American civilian jobs is quite challenging. If you want to talk about what works in Europe, you need to talk about all the factors that make it work.

People in this discussion are saying "If you give cash to an addict, they will spend it on drugs." Well, most poor Americans have serious health issues. It is one of the things that makes them poor.

If you need medical care and you have to pay for it and it's very expensive, giving such a person money won't go to food. It will go to medical bills.

If you want to give Americans cash instead if food stamps, first you need to give them free medical care. We really need universal basic health care in the US.

If you need medicine more than you need food, why is it bad that the money is going to medicine? How is it better to give someone medicine + [cost of food] than to give them [cost of medicine + code of food] and then let them buy medicine and food as needed? It's the same number of tax dollars in benefits and fewer in overhead. And more value to the recipient because they get to decide if it's worth $5000 to have a marginally effective surgery or use the money for something else, instead of having a bureaucracy decide they can't have it when they want it or they can have it but not the cash equivalent if they need something else more.

I guess I can see that if say, you have a person with an addiction, if they don't have access to free healthcare to treat that addiction, giving them straight-up cash might be a poor idea.

Of course that's just another reason to implement universal healthcare, not to shame poor people with food stamps.