April 2, 2009
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission Says
Health Care Reform Won't Solve Nation's Health Problems – Reforms to
Support Healthier Choices Urgently Needed
Children Face Grim Prospect of Sicker, Shorter Lives than their Parents
Commission Calls for: All Sectors of Society to
Join in Eliminating Obstacles to Good Health; Banning Junk Food and
Requiring Physical Activity in Schools; Significant Support for Early
Education
Washington, DC, April 2, 2009 – Essential as health care
reform is, it will not be enough to close most of the gap between how
healthy Americans are and how healthy they could be. Without urgent
action to take proven steps that can make a big difference in health,
America’s children could have sicker, shorter lives than their parents,
according to a prominent national commission.
The
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Commission to Build a Healthier
America today urged all Americans to make healthier choices and society
to help remove the obstacles so many people face in making those
choices, issuing 10 cross-cutting recommendations for improving the
nation’s health. According to the Commission, how long and how well
Americans live depend more on where we live, learn, work and play than
on medical care, which accounts for only an estimated 10 to 15 percent
of preventable early deaths. Building a healthier nation requires a
broader view of health, the Commission said.
The Commission paid particular attention to crafting effective
measures for meeting the needs of children and families. “To build a
healthier America, it’s essential to put improving health front and
center on the national agenda outside of health care and health
programs,” said Commission Co-chair Mark McClellan, former head of the
Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare &
Medicaid Services. “Today’s children are at greater risk for a
lifetime of poor health, limiting their opportunities for productive
and long lives. This is unacceptable, but the evidence is clear that
it doesn’t have to be that way.”
According to the Commission, Americans are not nearly as healthy as
they should be – regardless of where they live and their income,
education and racial or ethnic group. Good health begins with personal
responsibility, but the nation’s health will not improve unless
individuals do more to incorporate health into all aspects of everyday
life, and unless leaders do more in their decision making to support
healthier decisions – from education to child care to community
planning to business practices, the Commission said. The Commission
spent a year exploring the state of America’s health and how health is
shaped by where and how people live their lives.
“Everyone must be involved in the effort to improve health because
health is everyone’s business,” said Co-chair Alice M. Rivlin, former
head of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the first
director of the Congressional Budget Office. “People should make
healthy choices by eating better, getting enough physical activity and
not smoking. Communities and employers should support those choices by
creating healthy environments. And the federal government should make
and enforce healthy policies, like ensuring that all subsidized food is
healthy and junk food is eliminated from schools.”
The RWJF Commission is a national, independent and nonpartisan group
comprising innovators and leaders with a rich diversity of experience
and depth of knowledge. (See attached list of Commission members.)
The Commission’s charge was to focus on factors beyond medical care to
identify practical and innovative strategies for improving the nation’s
health.
The Commission’s recommendations are rooted in the twin philosophy
that good health requires individuals to make responsible personal
choices and society to remove the obstacles blocking too many Americans
from making healthier choices and leading healthier lives. Given the
seriousness of the nation’s economic downturn, the Commission also
focused on developing proven and feasible recommendations that offer
the strongest potential to leverage limited resources. Among the
Commission’s key recommendations are:
• Give kids a healthy start. Ensure that all children, especially
very young children in low-income families, have high-quality education
and child care. This means increasing federal government spending to
support early childhood development for young children in low-income
families. This recommendation is critical, because evidence is now
very strong that early childhood has a tremendous impact on a person’s
health across a lifetime.
• Ban junk food from schools. Feed
children only nutritious foods in schools. Federal funds should be used
exclusively for healthful meals.
• Get kids moving. All schools
(K-12) should include at least 30 minutes every day for all children to
be physically active. Although children should be active at least one
hour each day, only one third of high school students currently meet
this goal.
• Help all families follow healthy diets. More than one
in every 10 American households lack reliable access to enough
nutritious food. Federal supplemental nutrition programs should be
fully funded and designed to meet the needs of hungry families with
nutritious food.
• Eliminate so-called nutrition deserts. Create
public-private partnerships to open grocery stores in communities
without access to healthful foods. Many inner-city and rural families
lack this access; for example, Detroit, a city of 139 square miles, has
just five full-service grocery stores.
“For too long we have focused on medical care as the solution to our
health problems, when the evidence tells us the opposite,” said RWJF
President and CEO Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., M.B.A. “We must make it
possible for more people to make healthy decisions and avoid getting
sick in the first place. The Commission has provided us with a
principled, sensible and experience-driven blueprint. We cannot afford
to wait to implement these recommendations.”
Social Factors Play a Dominant Role in Determining a Lifetime of Health
Some Americans can expect to die 20 years earlier than others just a
few miles away because of differences in education, income, race or
ethnicity and where and how they live. On average, Americans who
graduate from college can expect to live five years longer than those
who do not complete high school. And they can expect to be healthier,
too. People who are poor are more than three times as likely as those
who are affluent to suffer physical limitations from a chronic illness.
The
Commission’s report, Beyond Health Care: New Directions to a Healthier
America, explains that many people live and work in circumstances and
places that make good health difficult. Many very young children do
not get the quality of care and support they need and grow up to be
less healthy as a result; many Americans do not have access to grocery
stores that sell nutritious food; still others live in communities that
are unsafe or in disrepair, making it difficult or risky to be
physically active.
“While each of us must make a commitment to our own health, society
must improve opportunities for choosing health, especially for those of
us facing the most challenging obstacles,” said Rivlin. “We must
acknowledge that some families and communities have a higher hill to
climb than others. We cannot build a healthier America if we leave
them behind.”
Commission Recommendations Link to Economic Stimulus Package
Several of the RWJF Commission’s recommendations reinforce elements
of the economic stimulus package recently passed by Congress. For
example, the new law provides additional funding for nutrition
assistance to low-income families enrolled in the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly Food Stamps. The law
also provides an additional $500 million to the Special Supplemental
Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). The
Commission believes that adequate funding of SNAP and WIC is essential
to ensuring that the nutritional needs of all families are met.
In addition, the stimulus package offers opportunities for states
and communities to act on the Commission’s recommendations that health
be incorporated into all facets of policy and decision making. For
example, when stimulus funds are to be used to rebuild roads,
communities should also build sidewalks and bike lanes to expand
opportunities for physical activity.
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