Government out of our kitchens. Will the dependents and retirees receive a waiver with an EBT card?
Via AF Times
The Air Force is taking aim at obesity among dependents and retirees through two pilot programs that could eventually go servicewide.
Part of the new Healthcare to Health initiative — H2H for short — the programs target parents of Air Force children as well as spouses and retirees through interactive courses on base, said Kelly Williams, a certified health education specialist who has spent two years developing the initiative.
The first, called 5210 Healthy Military Children, teaches moms and dads how to make consistent, healthy meal and exercise choices at home. The second, Group Lifestyle Balance, focuses on weight management, physical activity and healthy eating for spouses and retirees at risk for weight-related health problems like Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, strokes and heart attacks.
The programs are underway at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, and Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho. They’ll begin at four more Air Force bases by the end of the fiscal year: MacDill in Florida; Peterson in Colorado; Shaw in South Carolina and Tinker in Oklahoma.
The bases were picked based on the population of dependents — all have at least 10,000 — and what, if any, health programs are already offered at the installations. The Air Force also took into account the number of patients younger than 18 who are classified as obese and the non-active-duty population that met the criteria for metabolic syndrome indicators. Those include weight, blood pressure, cholesterol level, triglyceride and fasting blood glucose levels.
The military health care system promises to be stretched thin as the country faces the impact of more than a decade of war and a swelling retiree population, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. Jonathan Woodson said in the 2012 Military Health System stakeholders’ report.
An added burden: Many retirees are dropping their private insurance to return to the more affordable Tricare.