I suppose we’ve all become jaded a bit over the years. When you ask for intelligent changes to policy or rules, you get used to having your concerns ignored, sometimes validated, and mostly not acted upon.
But a recent announcement flies in the face of that argument, and before any more time goes by, I think it’s important to talk about it.
The news, which you may have heard: the U.S. Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has agreed to allow seniors on Medicare to view CGM data on their smartphones.
As Diabetes Patient Advocacy Coalition noted, this is pretty big news, and it’s thanks to advocacy of this organization and others, as well as individual advocates across the country, that this injustice has been righted.
There are a couple of reasons why I wanted to talk about this.
To begin with, this is how advocacy is supposed to work. In this instance, people saw that seniors on Medicare were being denied the right to use their smartphones as a medical device. Those advocates banded together and took their message to CMS, who were empowered to consider the advocacy message and act on it. And they did.
Second, I wanted to talk about this win because it’s a win. So often, we advocate for causes, and our causes remain causes for years until some movement happens on them (and that’s the most times I’ve written “causes” in one sentence in my life). Once our cause is helped along by a decision or a product launch or something else, we move on to the next cause so quickly that we almost forget the fact that real progress was actually made.
I don’t want that to happen here. Let’s stop and smell the lithium ion of our cell phone batteries and recognize that something pretty great happened here. And you and I had a hand in making it happen.
Let’s take a moment and remember that advocacy works. And let’s remember to thank all those responsible for making it work.
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