Suggestions Wanted: What Should We Say to New Health Prevention Council?

by Scout

What is the New Health Prevention Council?

To really launch health bigger than it’s been before healthcare reform established a new National Prevention, Health Promotion and Public Health Council. Why is it bigger than anything before? Because it’s not just made up of folk in health, but includes heads of 17 Cabinet level departments and agencies. People like head of EPA, Dept of Education, and Dept of Transportation. This allows for their plans to be really crosscutting (can anyone say bike lanes or school lunches?) This group is charged with coming up with a National Prevention Strategy by March of next year (yikes). You can see in Emilia’s post how we just submitted comments on their draft plan this last weekend.

But you didn’t get a chance to submit your own comments, well, never fret because…

We’ve Been Invited to Talk to Them Next Week!

We just got an invitation down to HHS headquarters to attend a stakeholders conference for this Prevention Council next Wed (Dec 15th). Now you never know what kind of a cattle call these things are but we’ve been honing our skills on getting the mic and we were long ago taught to wear very bright clothing to these things (thank you to the early lesbian health activists). So, it’s pretty likely we’ll get a chance to speak up. Which means…

What Do You Want Us To Say?

Remember that chilling statistic CDC gave us, tobacco, exercise and nutrition problems create 85% of our total health care costs in this country. This issue is massive. And we know LGBT discrimination translates right into unhealthy behaviors that put all of us at greater risk for all these chronic diseases. What are your concerns about LGBT tobacco use, exercise, nutrition, wellness, prevention, health… bring it on! The Network is only as good a mouthpiece as you can make us. Email your input to lgbthealthequity@gmail.com. We’ll do our level best to get your voice heard!