New Year, New Goals!
After a very productive 2024 Legislative Session, we want to carry the momentum into the 2024-2025 community and statewide work! We’ve started planning for the 2025 Legislative Session agenda, having conversations with Legislators and partners to determine our priority issues and create collaborative strategies for success. We’re also working to recruit more advocates for health across the state, and add to our efforts to improve the health of all Idahoans.
Some of the key issues we’re currently moving forward on are community complete streets, which help all types of cities across the state fund projects focused on safe walking and biking and opportunities for creating more active spaces. We’ve also started discussing cardiac emergency response plans, which help place AED’s in schools to respond to sudden cardiac events and support better outcomes for these emergencies. We’ll continue our efforts around a comprehensive tobacco package that will place a fee on tobacco retail licenses to support robust compliance to verify that anyone selling any kind of tobacco product, including electronic cigarettes, is not selling these products to youth. The tobacco efforts will also include removing exemptions from the Idaho Clean Indoor Air Act, to ensure that everyone is protected from the harms of secondhand smoke, and including electronic products in tobacco taxes and increasing the tax on all tobacco products to reach the national average. We also anticipate the continued defense of the Medicaid Expansion program, and are looking at produce prescriptions and other nutrition incentives to help reduce the health disparities for Medicaid participants.
Also, I recently attended the 2nd Annual Idaho Hispanic/ American Indian Healthcare Conference, hosted by the Idaho Commission on Hispanic Affairs in Pocatello. This gave us the opportunity to learn about specific needs in these populations and build on these relationships to partner for policies that will help support the health needs in typically underserved populations. We had a variety of very informative and useful conversations, and were also able to meet with policy makers and community leaders to offer more collaborative work across our efforts.
We have big goals for the coming year, and plenty of opportunities for volunteers and advocates to engage and help us move these efforts forward. If your interested in getting involved in these advocacy efforts to help improve the health of all Idahoans, please let us know!