It’s Time to Advocate for the Issues Affecting Home Care and Hospice
 Dear Colleague:
We Need to Keep Up the Fight for America's Future!
If you had any doubts left about the importance of engaging
lawmakers in Washington, DC when it comes to health care and
the particular needs of home care and hospice providers, 2010
will have quashed them. In the run-up to passage of health care
reform, NAHC held more in-person advocacy events here in the
Nation’s Capital than ever before, recognizing the need
to connect with legislators face-to-face and share the stories
that only hospice and home care providers can. And our voices
were heard! NAHC and home care and hospice providers played a
significant role in molding the unprecedented health care reform
bill that ultimately was enacted, and helped drastically reduce
cuts that had been proposed. But our work is not done.
As federal regulatory agencies, states, insurance companies, and
others work through a complex implementation of the new law’s extensive
provisions, we have to continue to ensure that our patients’ needs are
understood and protected. The best way to do so is to explain to your representatives
in Congress how critical the high-value, high-quality care that home care
and hospice providers deliver every day are to some of the nation’s
most vulnerable individuals.
For years, we’ve worked to educate members of Congress
about home care’s ability to transform and right a system
out of balance, and what it means to patients across the United
States. The challenges that came with the spiraling costs of
health care did not happen overnight, and they won’t be
corrected overnight. All the while, the nation’s population
has been shifting dramatically with the burgeoning elderly population,
and along with this must come new paradigms within health care
and an emphasis on managing chronic illness using high-quality,
cost-effective care delivered in the home and community — keeping
patients where they prefer to be and with their loved ones.
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