Today, in a live webinar and a companion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Department of Health and Human Services released its “National Prevention Strategy,” a broad effort to realize the preventive care goals set forth in the Affordable Care Act. The specifics of implementation are still taking shape, but the release centered around four primary talking points:
- The ACA seeks to “remove cost as a barrier” to “clinical preventive services,” by requiring new private plans to cover preventive services in the “strongly recommended” and “recommended” categories (examples include certain vaccines and screening procedures) with no cost to the beneficiary. Medicare will take a similar approach, and state Medicaid plans will be incentivized to do the same.
- It promotes workplace wellness initiatives through new grants and a re-evaluation of existing programs.
- It seeks to involve communities and local governments through community-based efforts. “Community Transformation Grants,” for example, “promise to improve nutrition, increase physical activity, promote smoking cessation and social and emotional wellness, and prioritize strategies to reduce health care disparities.”
- It makes preventative health a federal priority through “a newly established National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council, involving more than a dozen federal agencies,” which “will develop a prevention and health promotion strategy for the country.” It also promises a “national strategy to improve the quality of health care,” and “improved data collection on health disparities.”
In addition to the four big messages, HHS officials pointed to initiatives designed to address specific, salient concerns such as smoking, obesity and the looming shortage of primary caregivers.
