Enough About HCR - What About Home Visiting?

I'm glad you asked. As Dave mentioned in his previous post, the President not only signed into law major reforms to the health care system (yawn), he also created the first ever dedicated federal funding stream for early childhood home visitation services.

So starting now (or as soon as HHS issues guidance) $1.5 billion (BILLION!) will go to states over the next 5 years so that they can implement/expand access to high quality early childhood home visitation services. As an example of why this is a good thing, the HV program started by my organization has been proven to:

 Reduce child maltreatment;
 Decrease pre-term, low weight babies;
 Increase utilization of prenatal care;
 Increase access and use of primary care medical services;
 Increase child immunization rates to improve health outcomes;
 Increase school readiness;
 Decrease dependency on public assistance and other social services; and
 Improve parent-child interaction.

There are several other home visiting models out there with similar results, and collectively, we've been working on getting this funding for a long time (5 years for me, 6 years for some of the folks).

Just now starting to sink in that this is really happening. And I wanted to share the good news with my Sassy Family because there is absolutely NO WAY we would be in this position under a different Administration.

Now then, I think I'll go through the Sassy Archives and find those videos from election night.