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November
23,
2004 OBESITY
ROUNDUP: MEDICARE AND MORE
Several high-profile
plans to address the nation’s obesity epidemic
surfaced between July and November this year, beginning with an announcement
by HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services would drop a reference in its coverage manual explicitly stating
that obesity is not a disease. The change, while not conferring official
disease status to obesity, is paving the way for coverage of evidence-based
weight loss therapies under Medicare. In early November, a Medicare advisory
committee met with experts to determine whether bariatric surgery is
a safe and effective obesity therapy, concluding that there was not enough
evidence yet to recommend the surgery for people 65 and older. On August 24, NIH
released the final version of its “Strategic
Plan for NIH Obesity Research,” which included a host of behavioral
and medical research goals across several NIH institutes. Translation
research, education and outreach and multidisciplinary training are prominently
featured in the final plan. NIH is expected to spend about $440.3 million
on obesity research in FY 2005, an increase of nearly 10 percent over
FY 2004. In September, the
Institute of Medicine released an “action plan” for
childhood obesity. The report, “Childhood Obesity: Health in the
Balance,” outlines specific obesity prevention recommendations
for federal, state and local government, industry, health professionals,
school boards and parents and families. The recommendations are familiar
ones: Nutrition standards for food and drink sold in schools, calls for
industry to provide more nutrition information on their foods, changes
in city planning to encourage more physical activity and pleas for health
professionals to track body mass index and offer obesity counseling to
children. To read more about
NIH’s
strategic plan, go here.
To download a copy of the IOM report, go here. |
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