March 29, 2019 — Are you ready for vegetables by prescription? That’s what nutrition policy wonks are pushing with a new publication in PLOS Medicine. Yujin Lee, a postdoctoral fellow and lead author, sums up their bold claims: We found that encouraging people to eat healthy foods in Medicare and Medicaid – healthy food prescriptions – could be as […]
March 1, 2019 — “I just worry about opening the floodgates.” These are the kinds of things you might hear when you talk to folks who’ve never lived with obesity about access to care. But undaunted by such implicit bias, 35 volunteers made more than 100 visits with their elected representatives to ask for real action now on obesity. […]
September 10, 2018 — A striking pair of papers in JAMA Surgery offers powerful food for thought about bariatric surgery. The first is a systematic review of how safe and effective it is for Medicare patients. The second is a commentary from well-respected health policy researchers. After reading these papers, we see a huge huge gap. On one hand, we have […]
August 31, 2017 — “At the end of the day, what we’d like to see is fewer obese people in the Medicare population about which we have to have these conversations.” Those striking words came Aloysius Cuyjet, MD, MPH. They came after he chaired more than five hours of evidence review at Medicare’s advisory committee on evidence and coverage […]
August 5, 2016 — Obesity treatment prevention is probably the one and only obesity-related policy that is working with 99% effectiveness. A new study in Obesity gives us hard numbers for this overwhelming success. John Batsis and Julie Bynum analyzed Medicare claims from 2012 and 2013 for more than 27 million beneficiaries. They were looking for people who received intensive […]
March 24, 2016 — With much fanfare Wednesday, CMS announced that Medicare will begin paying the YMCA and other providers to deliver lifestyle coaching known as the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) to people at risk for developing diabetes. The program is for people with excess body weight and prediabetes – high blood sugar that has not yet progressed to diabetes. This […]
February 12, 2016 — An increasingly archaic way to think about the chronic disease of obesity in aging is to assume that excess weight is protective beyond a certain age. Such thinking has never been backed by much evidence. Now, the benefits of evidence-based obesity care are becoming evident to people concerned about the growing burden of chronic diseases in […]
June 20, 2013 — In a week of milestones for obesity policy, Democrats and Republicans joined in Washington to introduce the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act in both the Senate and the House of Representatives on Wednesday. Coming a day after the American Medical Association voted for the first time to declare obesity a disease, this bill opens the […]
April 13, 2013 — Here’s a hint of change in the air. This week prominent Democrats and Republicans alike heaped praise on an Obama health policy nominee. Marilyn Tavenner, nominated by President Obama to head the powerful Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), sailed through a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor traveled […]
