Health Action 2009

On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of last week I attended the Health Action 2009 Conference. The conference is hosted by Families USA. On the front page of their website they state, "Since 1982, Families USA has worked to promote high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans." They are a really neat group. Here is a link to the website- it has a LOT of info and can be daunting. I'm going to include bits that I have found particularly helpful in future posts but if you want to check out the entire organization here it is.
http://www.familiesusa.org/

Families USA works to promote health care for all. The whole conference was about health care reform, advocacy, and grassroots organization. The workshops included such things as: medicare, immigrants and health care, medical research, funding advocacy work, state reform, and long-term care (just to name a few). There were people in attendance from 45 states and D.C. People from small business groups, disease-specific groups, public health foundations, hospitals, law groups, not-for-profits and more. Interesting to me was that there were very few physicians or physicians groups! We're talking health care reform, and we provide health care, and we are just not there. It's so amazing to see all the work that goes on behind the scenes. Not just in Washington, but in the entire nation. There were a few hundred people, many who work on this full time, working for our patients that they may have access to us. There is just so much time put into this it made me want to do my part!

I had a morning meeting on the Hill Thursday morning so the first session I made it to was Representative Henry Waxman, who is the Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, under which most health issues fall. He discussed his views on health care reform and to sum it up he stated that reform should:

• Build on what we have. It should build on and protect the employer-based insurance that we currently have and strengthen and improve the Medicare/Medicaid/CHIP programs.


• Ensure quality care for all.


• Incorporate Health Information Technology


• Stress the importance of preventive care.

I was excited because these are all part of ACOGs Reform Agenda. If you would like to see the Congressman/Chairman's talk link here and choose lunch session:

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/hcast_index.cfm?display=detail&hc=3098

I didn't get to make it to the morning session but I hear it was very good as House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Sen. Debbie Stabenow both spoke.