LANSING – Governor Rick Snyder’s special message on health and wellness will seek to mobilize corporate and health care industry-led efforts to fund public service campaigns to reduce obesity and infant mortality, sources have told Gongwer News Service.
Snyder is expected to unveil the special message Wednesday, and the message is said to still be undergoing work. One aspect that several sources said Mr. Snyder would like to include is creating health insurance discounts for healthy people although sources said that was proving legally difficult to achieve.
Sources, who spoke on condition they not be named because Snyder has yet to make public his proposals, said the governor is looking for actions that could be immediately taken. The governor, for example, likes efforts by the state’s hospitals to offer healthier food in their cafeterias, patient meals and discontinuing the use of desserts as rewards in physical therapy.
Much of what has been discussed on obesity and especially infant mortality involves greater public awareness efforts, like promoting the longtime “back to sleep” campaign to urge parents to put their infants to sleep on their backs to reduce the chance of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Snyder also will make enacting the state’s health care exchange, part of the federal health care legislation enacted in 2010, part of his special message. Bills on the issue are currently being drafted.
Whether Snyder’s proposals will go deeper is a subject of some question. Gongwer has learned that a draft of the message from about six weeks ago included some major proposals, like taxing sugared beverages and raising the cigarette tax from $2 to $3 a pack. That proposal also called for bolstering physical education requirements in K-12 schools. However, sources also told Gongwer that the Snyder administration has significantly pared its proposal and some of those items might have been eliminated from what Snyder will propose.
And Snyder’s pattern on special messages has been to start with the proverbial kitchen sink and then trim down to the eventual proposal.
This story was provided by Gongwer News Service. To subscribe, click on Gongwer.Com
a>>
