Healthcare Funding Alert: Contact Your Member of Congress Today!
Posted on July 12, 2010 by ebrennan | No Comments
By MLS, Mary E. White, MLS, Kaiser Permanente Medical Offices, Governmental Relations Chair
On Wednesday, July 14th, the House Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Subcommittee is scheduled to mark-up its Fiscal Year 2011 spending bill. This is the annual bill that funds all agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services (e.g., NIH, NLM, CDC, HRSA).
Now is the time to contact your representative and encourage him/her to support funding for the National Institutes of Health and National Library of Medicine.
To find your representative, please go to congress.org and enter your zip code. Calling works best (phone numbers for all congressional offices are listed), but if you prefer to communicate via e-mail, you can do this through this site as well.
Tips for communicating with congressional offices:
- Identify yourself as a constituent and ask to speak with the legislator’s Health Care Legislative Assistant.
- Tell the aide that you are a health sciences librarian who understands and benefits from the programs and services of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.
- Ask that the legislator support the following appropriations priorities recommended by the Medical Library Association andAssociation Academic Health Sciences Libraries in the Fiscal Year 2011 Appropriations bill: $35 billion for the National Institutes of Health, an increase of $4 billion over FY10; $402 million for the National Library of Medicine, an increase of $48.24 million over FY10.
- Briefly explain why these issues are important to you. For example, if your library receives NIH and NLM funding describe these initiatives and the impact they make to support health care, education, and research in your institution and in your local community. You might explain that NLM, as the world’s largest biomedical library and part of the NIH, plays a pivotal role in translating the results of the $32 billion of NIH-funded biomedical research into practice and developing electronic information services that provide scientists, health professionals, and the public with access to the Library’s online information resources.
- Give the aide your contact information and ask to be informed about the actions of the legislator on these key issues.
The following background information is also available:
- National Library of Medicine Fact Sheet/Talking Points
- Map of NLM Outreach Projects: 2005–2010
- NLM Outreach Projects: Overview and Examples
- MLA/AAHSL Testimony in support of NLM’s FY 2011 Appropriation
Posted 7/12/10
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