Why should healthcare spending be excluded from "anti-poverty" spending? The fact of the matter is that in the US, healthcare is privatized and people have to pay for it directly or indirectly (ie. by their employer). Therefore if the government is helping to pay for it, it's an anti-poverty program. It's not any different than food stamps counting as anti poverty spending.
Classifying healthcare spending as "anti-poverty" spending may lead to an inaccurate assessment of the effectiveness of these programs. Including healthcare spending in the evaluation of anti-poverty initiatives, it could potentially mask the true impact of more targeted interventions, such as food stamps, housing assistance, and cash transfers. This could, in turn, hinder the development of more effective policies and programs aimed at reducing poverty.
I don't buy this. If you want to figure out what the most effective policies/programs are, you'd need to run analysis on each program separately. If you did that, you would be able to separate out which parts had the greatest ROI. Dropping the most expensive component on the basis that it's ineffective is basically cherrypicking, especially when the claim that's being analyzed is whether government anti-poverty programs as a whole are effective or not.