DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Meeting of: Secretary's Council on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for
2010
April 23, 1999, Proceedings
DR. SHALALA: I would like to welcome you to the third meeting of the Council on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2010. We are actually on the home stretch in developing the 2010 objectives, and we, of course, will need your experience and expertise to help us cross the finish line. We intend to have a first rate national prevention agenda for the next decade.
Let me start, too, by acknowledging the contributions of the former Assistant Secretaries for Health. Julie Richmond, whose 1979 Surgeon General's report called "Healthy People" was really the origin of this initiative-I see his bag is here. Oh, there he is. Julie, I'm just saying nice things about you.
[Laughter.]
Julie, I want to thank you, too, for participating in last year's regional meeting in Philadelphia and doing the keynote address at the Healthy People Consortium. We always value your wise counsel.
Bob Windom initiated the mid-decade reporting so that everybody in the country could hear about our successes and whatever challenges we had to improve health status. Bob, I particularly want to commend your continuing work in translating Healthy People into State and local actions, with Healthy Floridians, really, and the multiple projects with the American Medical Association. Really a remarkable contribution.
Merlin DuVal chaired the Institute of Medicine panel that created the Healthy People 2000 Consortium. We thank you, too, for your contributions.
I know Ed is with us [by telephone] and Phil Lee, hopefully, is going to be joining us in a few minutes.
I know that Charles Edwards and Jim Mason regret that they could not be with us.
You are going to have very productive deliberations today, because David Satcher is chairing. Whenever David Satcher is chairing, things move forward.
We, of course, want to release Healthy People 2000 in January of next year. And let me say to all of you now something that you do not know, and that is, when Healthy People 2010 is released in January of next year, I intend to have a budget request that the President will submit to Congress on prevention accompanying the release of the Healthy People 2010. The department has identified prevention as one of the three major new initiatives we are going to go to the White House with this year, and I want to fit a major departmental initiative, a budget initiative on prevention, with the Healthy People 2010 initiative. So we can put our money where our goals are, and I think it will be very exciting. A number of people around this table are going to lead the process of putting that initiative together. As you know, we start about now for the 2001 budget. So we are going to lay out a budget strategy along with the release of Healthy People 2010.
We have also taken Healthy People 2010 internationally. In November, I took the draft objectives with me to Egypt and I shared it with the Minister of Health and a Steering Committee on Healthy Egyptians. They are using the framework to engage in a consultation process all over Egypt, and they are going to build their own Healthy People 2010 report. We actually have consultants out there with them in Egypt helping them put together the same process. So Healthy People is going international.
I have just had a conversation with the Minister of Health for Lebanon, too, to get him to start to think about this process.
David, I guess today you are going to talk about changes in the draft objectives. I have gotten a lot of letters myself. The whole point, I think, is to make sure all this is grounded in science and expert opinion but also that it reflects public comment. A lot of members of the public have gone through a process themselves and have sent in very thoughtful comments, and I think it is extremely important that they see their comments reflected in this report. I think we just got a long letter from the wife of the Mayor of Chicago who led a children's process, and, you know, when Maggie Daly sends you recommendations, I suggest you integrate them.
[Laughter.]
But all of this has to be-we got 11,000 comments? All of this has to be, of course, focused on quality. We have actually heard from people from every State, including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. You have to refine the objectives. These are this country's national health goals. They will launch us into the new millennium.
Finally, everybody put January 24-28 at the Omni Shoreham on their calendars for next year, because that is when we are going to acknowledge the new objectives and make the announcement. The President will be doing his State of the Union just before that, and I intend to make the pitch. I am sure that I will get a prevention initiative, but I intend to make the pitch that he link it as part of his State of the Union speech. David and I are used to appealing to the President. We always go in at the last minute. Everybody else gets talked down by OMB, but we always appeal.
[Laughter.]
The President, if you do not know, is a soft touch at the end of the budget process for people like us, so we usually do pretty well at the end. But I think the idea that the department is going to put together a budget that goes along with this should encourage all of you that this is a very serious process and that we intend to make it a priority for the department.
I will be there January 24-28.
I think the floor is turned over to you. Shall we go around the room and have people introduce themselves?
[Introductions were made. Dr. Lee and Dr. Brandt spoke by telephone from California and Oklahoma.]
DR. SHALALA: There are more people, Phil and Ed, in this room than there are in the building today.
[Laughter.]
Phil, one of the things you missed is that I announced that, the month that we are going to be releasing the 2010 report, we have also identified prevention as one of the three major new initiatives of the department. So we intend to have a budget strategy that accompanies the report in January.
DR. LEE: Great.
DR. SHALALA: So, I am sure that you and Ed will have some ideas about what we ought to put into it. But we are going to go through a major internal budget process to put together a big new prevention initiative that will go together with the report.
David, I think I am turning the meeting over to you. We are going to take a break at 10:30.
DR. LEE: Thanks, Donna.