Oregon Health Policy Committee report June 2016-
The HP committee met on June 15th and had a very full agenda. This was Raji Koppula's last meeting as Chair of Health Policy as she leaves to attend a DNP program. Raji will be missed as she has done an excellent job this past year and is a strong health policy advocate. Also, Mary Chesney had her last official meeting on the HP board but will continue on as Health Policy advisor, which is fantastic as she is a wealth of healthy policy knowledge. In addition there was tremendous response to request for committee positions and several new committee members were chosen and will be announced in July.
Dave Mason's Capitol Hill and Regulatory Update is summarized as follows:
Time is running short for the final session of Congress before summer break and there is still no budget resolution, largely due to the spending caps, which means there is a greater chance for a rush in the fall for a continuing resolution to keep the government funded and avoid default. The Senate Appropriations committee has approved a HHS, Labor and Education bill with bipartisan support that included flat funding for Title IX Nurse Education. It does increase NIH funding by$2 million and has no cuts to ACA or restrictions on family planning monies.
Congress has multiple bills related to mental health reform and should see a full House vote sometime in July.
The Supreme Court ends term at the end of June and with split court a 4/4 decision will leave a lower court decision standing. Awaiting news of the U.S. vs. Texas on a challenge to immigration policy that prevents undocumented from deportation, and another Texas case related to the minimal distance from a hospital a doctor performing an abortion needs to have admitting privileges.
NAPNAP has two "calls to action" this month. As of our June 15th meeting only 260 out of over 8000 members had responded to the first call. Just to note there is a limit of 6 "calls to action" per year and they are reserved for the most vital issues to pediatric APRN's. The first call to action was regarding the VA APRN full practice decision. There were a total of 33,000 comments submitted to the Federal Register both for and against and the prevailing knowledge is that the comments are about equal with most of the opposition coming from Anesthesiologists. The second call to action was in support of ZIKA funding. If you have not yet responded to the CALLS TO ACTION go to the NAPNAP website and after entering your membership ID# and password click on "Advocacy Center" and then click on "take action."
Also a reminder to read Inside the Beltway every other month for a more in-depth view of what NAPNAP and the Health Policy committee is doing.
I will be starting as the Health Policy Committee Chair July 1. I feel quite inadequate to the task but am very pleased that we have a strong committee and strong leadership from Mary Chesney to Laura Searcy and outstanding staff support from Michele Stickel and Dave Mason. I expect this committee will be active!
Respectfully submitted, Nancy Cavanaugh