The Georgians for a Healthy Future board of directors invites you to join us for an evening of camaraderie, conversation, and celebration as we gear up for the next big phase of health reform implementation: connecting hundreds of thousands of uninsured Georgians to coverage. Since our founding in 2008, Georgians for a Healthy Future has worked with all of you to provide a strong voice for Georgia’s health care consumers in the policy decisions that impact their lives. Please save the date for a reception and fundraiser on the evening of June 27th to celebrate our successes and prepare for the challenges ahead. Thanks to national health reform, consumers have more options than they have ever had before. But covering Georgia’s uninsured will take all of us, working in concert, to move our state forward. We need all hands on deck!  Please join us for an entertaining evening of celebration and conversation about our collective strength and how Georgians for a Healthy Future will continue to work on behalf of all Georgians to help navigate the rough waters ahead.

Thursday, June 27th from 6:00 to 8:00pm
Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough

Atlantic Station
201 17^th Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30363
Tickets are $60.

Host Committee Levels:
Cadet ~ $250
First Mate ~ $500
Captain ~ $1000+
To join the host committee, email Cindy Zeldin

To register, click here.

Georgians for a Healthy Future is excited to announce that Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic will be the keynote speaker for our third annual Health Care Unscrambled policy breakfast on January 10, 2013! We hope you’ll join us for this important event that brings together health care consumer advocates, stakeholders, and policymakers for a look ahead to the biggest health policy issues facing Georgia in the coming year. Jonathan’s full bio is below.

Jonathan Cohn covers domestic policy and politics for The New Republic, with a particular emphasis on social welfare, labor, and health care. He is also the author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—and the People Who Pay the Price.

Jonathan has been recognized in the pages of the Washington Post as “one of the nation’s leading experts on health care policy” and in the New York Times as “one of the best health care writers out there.” An item from Time suggested he “may be the smartest, most well-sourced health care writer in the country.”

Jonathan has won the Sidney Hillman and Harry Chapin media awards. He has also been a finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award, and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Jonathan, who is presently a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, has been a senior fellow with Demos, a media fellow with the Kaiser Family Foundation, and a Griffith Leadership fellow at the University of Michigan. He is a frequent public speaker and radio/television analyst.

Jonathan grew up in South Florida, where he became a devoted fan of the Miami Dolphins, and graduated from Harvard University, where he became a devoted fan of the Boston Red Sox. But his biggest devotion is to his wife and two children, with whom he lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Georgia policymakers are currently weighing the opportunity to cover an estimated 650,000 uninsured Georgians through an expansion of the Medicaid program. Under the Affordable Care Act, states can create a new category of eligibility for Medicaid to cover low-income individuals and families, financed almost entirely with federal dollars. Implementing this expansion is the only viable way to cover Georgia’s low-income uninsured, and it will pump resources into our state’s health care delivery system. We can’t miss this opportunity to improve access to health care and to strengthen Georgia’s health care economy, but we need your voice to make it happen.

Health care consumer and patient advocacy groups, providers, stakeholders, and community groups are coming together under the Cover Georgia umbrella to show support for expanding Medicaid, and we invite you to join us. If you are interested in getting involved in this discussion, please contact Amanda Ptashkin.

In November, the Cover Georgia campaign will unveil a website full of resources to help you better understand and advocate for the Medicaid expansion with policymakers and in your community. In the meantime, please visit Families USA’s Medicaid Expansion Center, with links to studies and reports about the value of Medicaid, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Tool Kit for State Advocates on the Medicaid expansion.

#CoverGeorgia

Gaining health care coverage through Medicaid improves access to care, reduces financial strain, and saves lives. Those are some of the takeaways from an engaging and enlightening forum hosted this morning by the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. The featured speakers, Dr. Heidi Allen and Dr. Benjamin Sommers, presented research findings on the impact of gaining Medicaid coverage on health status and participated in a panel discussion moderated by GBPI’s Tim Sweeney and Georgians for a Healthy Future’s Cindy Zeldin about the implications for Georgia as our state’s policymakers weigh the costs and benefits of covering the uninsured in Georgia through an expansion of Medicaid. The audience was live tweeting the event under #covergeorgia, allowing those who missed to hear what the audience was saying as it was happening. You can read their tweets here. Georgia Health News also reported on the event (story here). To get involved with Cover Georgia, the emerging educational and advocacy effort to make the case for expanding Medicaid to cover Georgia’s uninsured, please e-mail Georgians for a Healthy Future’s Outreach & Advocacy Director, Amanda Ptashkin.

Here are some photos from today’s event.

Last Thursday, Georgians for a Healthy Future, the Georgia Budget & Policy Institute, Partner Up for Public Health and the Georgia Rural Health Association returned to Butler, Taylor County for our second symposium in our Building a Healthy Georgia campaign.  The event focused on workforce and economic development, the value of access to care and the importance of public health.  Local community leaders, elected officials, key stakeholders, health care professionals and members of the general public  brought their expertise and passion to the conversation and helped highlight local challenges in having a readied workforce and a healthy community. We also discussed how the health of our communities means more than just access to care–it also means fiscal health. We were energized by the level of engagement and interest in working collaboratively to address our most pressing issues in the state and we look forward to continuing the dialogue!

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By Amanda McDougald

Healthy Augusta, Inc. was founded as an organization that will inspire and create a social movement through the Central Savannah River Area (CSRA) to improve the overall health of the CSRA by promoting and encouraging healthy habits through awareness, education, and support.  The vision of the founder is to integrate multiple disciplines to focus on applying knowledge gained through research or otherwise for the good of our community.  The idea is that action and awareness regarding healthy habits at a grassroots level should create changes in the way that people understand and integrate these ideas and habits into their daily lives as good diet, learn why We love Thrive Market – you learn more about it at The Diet Dynamo, and sports as trail running but for this the right equipment is necessary to avoid injuries so is better to get the best trail running shoes for this activity, the problem with this is that starting those new activities without care can cause other ailments as lack of personal investigation, so make sure if you´re going to play anew sport to investigate, like soccer, you should learn what a football line marker is. Plus, energy or athlete foot, so is important to use treatments as anti-fungal oils from places as the Sustainable Places Project and consult a doctor before starting to working out.  In short, people have to intrinsically desire to change their habits, and we would like to be agents of that motivation. On soccer news, Silva is a beast in Manchester City this season, hopefully he’ll help them do better than last season.

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We are now in the 28th day of the legislative session and as cross-over day approaches, things are heating under the gold dome.  By midnight on Thursday, bills must clear their chamber of origin if they are to pass this term unless they are attached to another eligible measure.  Georgians for a Healthy Future will continue to monitor legislation that will impact the health and welfare of all Georgians and work towards providing access to affordable and quality health care.

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On Saturday, March 27th at the Georgia International Convention Center in Atlanta the Georgia Free Clinic Network and the National Association of Free Clinics are sponsoring a Free Health Clinic for the state’s uninsured residents.  Based on the success of similar events country-wide, we anticipate serving 1800-2200 uninsured Georgians.  Similar free clinics have been sponsored by the NAFC in Houston TX, New Orleans LA, Little Rock AR, Kansas City MO, and Hartford CT.  These events have been documented by the Dr. Oz Show, Good Morning America, CNN and MSNBC.  The Atlanta event will also be a focus of the national press.   To view videos of some of previous one-day clinics, click here.

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