Trust for America's Health Praises Major Foundations for Supporting Prevention as...

Trust for America's Health Praises Major Foundations for Supporting Prevention
as a Central Part of Health Reform

WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Trust for America's Health
(TFAH) applauds six of the nation's top health foundations in their call for
prevention to be a central part of health reform.

The California Endowment, The Kresge Foundation, Nemours, Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Kaiser Permanente issued a joint
letter today saying that, "Over time, a focus on community prevention will
improve health, save money, reduce demands on our health system and, most
importantly, lead to a nation of healthier people and healthier places to
live."

These six foundations began the Healthy Eating Active Living (HEAL)
Convergence Partnership in 2006 with the shared goal of changing policies and
environments to achieve the vision of a healthy people living in healthy
places and have invested in numerous community-based disease prevention
programs that have yielded in evidence-based results. The foundations say
that "It is time to scale up these efforts by including robust financial
support for community prevention in any health systems reform."

"These philanthropies have provided leadership for years developing excellent
programs that have been shown to have a real impact on improving health in
communities," said Jeff Levi, Ph.D., Executive Director of Trust for America's
Health (TFAH). "Health reform provides the opportunity to take these lessons
learned and bring them to scale so we can improve the lives of millions of
Americans and save billions of dollars in health care costs."

TFAH's Prevention for a Healthier America: Investments in Disease Prevention
Yield Significant Savings, Stronger Communities report, which included a
review of evidence-based studies by The New York Academy of Medicine and an
economic model developed by the Urban Institute, found an investment of $10
per person per year in proven community-based programs to increase physical
activity, improve nutrition, and prevent smoking and other tobacco use, the
country could save the country more than $16 billion annually within five
years. This is a return of $5.60 for every $1.

Community-based, "primary" disease prevention programs include efforts outside
of the doctor's office. One example of this was the Shape Up Somerville
campaign in Somerville, Mass., which resulted in healthier food, safer routes
to school, farmers markets, community gardens, and more nutritional restaurant
options, and has already been shown to have slowed weight gain among first and
third graders in the city.

"Smart, strategic investments in proven prevention programs can have a real
payoff in dollars, workforce productivity, and quality of life," said Levi.
"Health reform provides the opportunity to invest in the most effective,
evidence-based types of prevention that have been shown through scientific
research to improve health and save lives -- and in many cases, these programs
have the added advantage of also lowering health care costs by helping people
avoid developing preventable diseases, like type 2 diabetes and hypertension,
and which cuts down on their need for expensive lifelong care and trips to the
doctor's office."

Trust for America's Health is a non-profit, non-partisan organization
dedicated to saving lives by protecting the health of every community and
working to make disease prevention a national priority.

SOURCE Trust for America's Health

Laura Segal of Trust for America's Health, +1-202-223-9870 x 27,
lsegal@tfah.org