Health Care Blog

We Can’t Wait: Jumpstarting Innovation in Health Care, Reducing Costs

Ed. note: Cross-posted from HealthCare.gov.

Health care costs remain a significant drain on the budgets of families, businesses, and federal and state governments. The health reform law, the Affordable Care Act, made significant strides in making Medicare more affordable and insurance companies more accountable. Congress is considering other ways to build on this progress, but we can’t wait to do more to help make our health care system more affordable.

In that spirit, the Obama Administration recently launched the Health Care Innovation Challenge. Made possible by the Affordable Care Act, this initiative will invest up to $1 billion in the best projects that doctors, hospitals, and other innovators propose to deliver high-quality medical care and save money. Projects that win this competition will use health care dollars more wisely, help create jobs, and help professionals improve the work they do for patients.

Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum and usually doesn’t start in Washington — we need the vision and experience of people who are already proving that our health care providers can and do provide better care and better health at lower cost. So we want to hear from you. Send us your innovative ideas and solutions, and submit a proposal outlining your vision for helping us transform the health care system. We’ll sort through these proposals and help put the best ones into practice.

If your proposal has strong evidence that it can start quickly, reduce costs, and improve health care, you can qualify for approximately $1 million to $30 million in an upfront investment. Priority is given to proposals that retrain workers and support job creation. You can find a fact sheet and the Funding Opportunity Announcement on our Healthcare Innovation Challenge Web page.

We’ll work with a wide variety of public and private organizations, including providers, payers, local governments, community and faith-based organizations, and other innovators whose compelling ideas can improve health care for patients. We are also looking for projects that help patients with the greatest health care needs, projects that can be up and running soon, and projects that rapidly hire, train, and deploy health care workers.

For example, the Health Care Innovation Challenge could support the use of personal and home care aides to help the elderly stay in their homes or expanding the use of community-based paramedics to provide basic services to individuals in rural communities.

Different communities have different needs and circumstances—some require unique, locally driven innovations. With the Health Care Innovation Challenge, we hope to give providers even more opportunities to make our health care system even stronger.

We look forward to hearing your ideas on how to make this happen. For more information, you can also visit http://innovations.cms.gov/.

Protecting Our Nation’s Youth

Ed note: This blog was cross-posted from the White House Blog.

For many kids, their first cigarette leads to a lifetime of addiction, and for many, serious disease. With 20 percent of U.S. high school students smoking, keeping tobacco out of the hands of minors can have a huge impact on our nation’s health now and in the future. That’s why President Obama and his Administration are committed to doing all we can to stop kids from smoking. 

We took an important step toward achieving that goal when the Food and Drug Administration issued more than 1,200 warning letters to retailers for selling tobacco to kids. The letters come after we conducted more than 27,500 inspections nationwide. Most retail store owners follow the law and don’t sell cigarettes to kids, but we’re reminding those who don’t that they have a responsibility to follow the law and that there are serious consequences if they fail to do so.   

You can search our database of inspection reports for tobacco retailers by name and location to see how your community checks out. You can also take the pledge to protect our nation’s children by supporting retailers who follow the law and do not sell cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products to youth. Let your local establishments know you appreciate their efforts to protect our kids. 

These kinds of activities are just a part of our campaign to stop children from smoking. President Obama was proud to sign the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act which gives us new tools to help stop young people from smoking before they start. Those tools include graphic warning labels that make the danger of smoking abundantly clear. Big tobacco companies are trying to stand in the way of these commonsense measures to protect our kids, but we’re confident their attempts will ultimately fail. 

We know our campaign against tobacco is a ‘winnable battle’. It is a public health challenge where the strategies to address it are proven and in-hand.  We have the science. Under President Obama, we have the leadership and commitment. And now, more than ever, we have the laws and policies that will allow us to protect the health of our nation’s kids.

Kathleen Sebelius is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.