Health groups hope to fight sequester by citing Labor-HHS cuts
Politico
By Matt DoBias
7/25/12 3:09 PM EDT
Public health groups would love to rally their supporters to fight the sequester, but they have one problem — no one understands it.
So now they’re looking at a new strategy: Use the House Labor-HHS bill as an illustration of how life could look under the sequester.
Two of the main groups — the Coalition for Health Funding and the American Public Health Association — held a rally on Capitol Hill Wednesday to protest the sequester. But they’re also going to have to come up with a strategy to organize pressure on Congress to replace those cuts in health programs. And they’re hoping that the deep reductions in the House Labor-HHS appropriations package can help them do that.
They believe the alarms that their members have sounded over the Republican appropriations package — which would strip money for the health law, cut $1.3 billion from HHS’s budget and zero out the Agency for Health Research and Quality — have given them the best tool to explain the complicated sequester process.
“This is what life looks like under the sequester,” explains Emily Holubowich, executive director for the Coalition for Health Funding. “The Labor-HHS markup was a wake-up call for the community.
“Engaging our grass roots and getting them to care about something as wonky as the budget sequester would have been really difficult if they hadn’t been hit in the face with the reality of the House Labor-HHS bill,” Holubowich said. “We want to harness the fear, anxiety and frustration about the [bill] in a productive way and say you need to point your anger and frustration toward getting a balanced approach to deficit reduction.”
That message was on display just outside the Capitol on Wednesday, where Senate HELP Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who also heads the Senate Appropriations Labor-HHS subcommittee, urged public health advocates to push back against lawmakers who want to slash health care programs even more to prevent the sequester’s defense cuts.
“What we’ve been hearing around this town for the last few weeks is that we got to hold defense absolutely sacred, that we can’t cut any pennies from the Pentagon,” Harkin said. “So therefore we need to take it all out from the non-defense discretionary budget.”
But Harkin said it was defense spending — not health care or education — that drove up the deficit. “Cutting [health care and education] is not going to get us out of the problem and the mess we’re in,” he said.
Ahead of the rally, Harkin released a report that shows steep reduction in childhood development programs, HIV prevention and testing, cancer screening, substance abuse programs and National Institutes of Health grants if the cuts go into effect next year.
The broader goal for the APHA and the coalition is to arm their advocates with statistics and talking points so they can pressure lawmakers when they return home during the August recess. The campaign includes pointers on how to make themselves heard during town hall meetings, sample letters to the editors and even a template to tweet messages to their elected officials.
At the same time, the national groups have been engaged in a lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill.
APHA Government Relations Director Don Hoppert said his team will continue to press their concerns about the sequester and the appropriations package.
“We’re trying to get them to talk about both,” he said. “We’re highlighting the fact that it’s coming.”
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