DPAC's Diabetes Policy Scorecard, CGM and more

Maybe only people who live with it truly get an idea of the effort diabetes takes. When you are managing a 24/7/365 condition, that sucks time, who has extra? Advocacy can easily be the thing we don’t have time for because diabetes sucked too much already.

Diabetes Patient Advocacy Coalition (DPAC) will make it hopes to change that. We will help people who care about diabetes see where to attention will help and make acting easier.

Let me introduce you to the Diabetes Patient Advocacy Coalition DPAC Scorecard. The Scorecard lists Congress alphabetically by state and by district within each state. (Sorry Wyoming.) It also lists six bills introduced by members of the Diabetes Caucus.

To the left of a member’s name, you can see if that Congressperson is a member of Diabetes Caucus. Then the Scorecard will show you if members of the House and Senators have cosponsored all, some, or none of these bills.

The Scorecard makes advocacy easier by shows bills that have Congress’ attention. Those that have a the most of attention may need just a little more to succeed.

I hope you have all seen Emily Coles video on diabetes advocacy and WWII airplanes. Emily is part of the team at the Diabetes Hands Foundation. As part of her work she is responsible for the tuDiabetes forums. This talk is a great example of the creative thinking she brings to DHF and our community.

I want to flip her talk around. Think of those red dots as little armored badges that not only fix the bullet holes but deflect new shots. Each badge we add to the plane helps it be stronger.

Each cosponsor of a Bill is one of those little red badges. The Bill with the most patches will be most successful on its mission. We should thank those who have cosponsored bills and encourage other members to add theirs too.

We the people matter. We bring urgency. A great case study of HIV activism as model for health advocacy, Back to Basics, at one point, says this:

We are suggesting that a new level of urgency is needed to make decision makers understand the consequences of inaction or of accepting the status quo. The message needs to be delivered not by the organizational executives or the cadre of scientists. Their message has to be delivered by the informed stakeholder or patient.

So let look at the scorecard. The top bill there is the Medicare CGM Coverage Bill 142* House cosponsors and 29* in the Senate. (*as of Sept 16 2015) That is a lot of badges. Maybe with just a few more it will fly. All we have to do is thank and ask.

DPAC makes that easy too. (As seen in other tuDiabetes Post)

Go here: ACT NOW
Fill in your Name and address.
Click Submit to draft CGM emails
DPAC will write “Thank You” email to existing cosponsors and an ask to those who have yet to cosponsor the bill. - automatically.
BONUS POINTS! Add your diabetes story to the top of the emails.
Click Submit to send.

If this is you first DPAC action click remember me. We will set a cookie so next time you don’t have to type in your information. (Hey it is good enough to make Amazon and Netflix easier, why not diabetes advocacy?)

Already done it? Do it again. There is nothing wrong with A LOT of repetition. Candidates repeat messages over and over again to get their message across. We can too.

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Thanks to DPAC for making this so easy. I used your Act Now link to thank my Representative Erik Paulsen (R-MN3) and my Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) for being co-sponsors of the bill. Once again I contacted my other Senator Al Franken (D-MN) and asked for his support. My previous attempts to get his support have been unsuccessful, but I can always keep writing…

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