Yesterday, The Diabetes Patient Advocacy Coalition (DPAC) held its March Ask an Expert webinar series. The webinar included Dr. Aaron Kowalski and Cynthia Rice, both from JDRF.
The webinar brought attention to CGM data that shows it helps, data that shows Artificial Pancreas systems work, and how Medicare is not covering CGM’s and why they are not.
Throughout the hour, hearing them both talk, it was constant note taking. A lot of the information that they spoke about I had either heard or seen elsewhere before, but it didn’t all make total sense or fully sink into my brain until yesterday.
The reasoning behind why Medicare does not cover CGM’s is based on 100% BS. We, as a community, have done a great job reaching out to politicians to explain why it’s BS and why the Medicare CGM Access Act needs to be sponsored and cosponsored, but we need to continue the fight.
After every webinar from DPAC, I like to create some sort of actionable plan that I can easily do in order to continue to do something. Yesterday, I set up a calendar reminder once every 2 weeks to send letters, tweets, emails, etc. to my elected officials. Why didn’t I do it every week? Because, I have to be practical for myself and advocate the way that works best for me. I already knew that if I did it every week, it wouldn’t get done and then I would start hitting the snooze or remind button on it and then eventually it would be months later and never taken action on the events.
I also set up a few tweets and posts that I would like to send out over a period of time. One thing that Aaron Kowalski said was, “One thing that I do everyday is just try and get people involved.” That definitely resonated with me. If I can only do 10 things in a day, but I can also somehow get 10 others every day to do something, that is a lot more getting accomplished.
Another thing that I plan on doing in the next few days is to create “My Story” so that I can have saved and ready to just copy and paste when reaching out to my elected officials. As Cynthia Rice mentioned, officials like data, but they love to hear the stories of their constituents.
If you did not get a chance to attend the webinar, then you can watch the replay.