Winter Brings Bleak Options for Poor

Winter has barely begun, and the soaring cost of home heating oil has already forced the poor to cut back on food, medicine and clothing — a plight known in the frigid Northeast as “heat or eat.”

..Former Democratic Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II has anxiously monitored the situation. As chairman of Citizens Energy Corp., which supplies heating oil to low-income customers in Massachusetts, Kennedy said the rapid escalation of heating costs could bring dire consequences.

“I believe there will be hundreds of people who will suffer and die this winter,” he said.

Los Angeles Times