Rick Pollack, President and CEO, AHA

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and it is a time to raise awareness of and reduce the stigma surrounding behavioral health issues. It’s also a time to recognize how mental illness and addiction can affect all of us — patients, providers, families and our society at large.
Stand up. Speak out. Be heard. The stakes for the future of health care are too high to do anything less.
The AHA’s 2024 Annual Membership Meeting gets underway in two days with a jam-packed schedule featuring prominent federal legislators, top officials from the Administration, influential newsmakers, and hospital and health system leaders who are propelling innovation in our field.
During the last two weeks we have seen a flurry of regulatory activity affecting hospitals and health care providers, and we expect that trend to continue for the next several months.
As the campaign season heats up, it’s important for all health care providers to speak up, ask hard questions of candidates and evaluate their thinking on the issues that affect our field.
America’s hospitals and health systems have proven their dedication to caring for their patients and communities time and again, particularly during the challenging circumstances in recent years. Though the Lown Institute’s so-called “Fair Share” report highlights the important contributions of certain hospitals, it misses the larger point, selectively relying on isolated data to paint a negative picture about the hospital field in general.
The Coalition to Protect America’s Health Care, which for 24 years has fought to protect access to high-quality care for all Americans, will now be known as the Coalition to Strengthen America’s Healthcare: Protecting 24/7 Care.
A March 14 editorial in the Washington Post calling for Congress to enact so-called site-neutral policies is deeply flawed and incredibly out of touch with the realities hospitals and health systems are experiencing right now.
In 30 days hospital and health system leaders from throughout the nation will gather in Washington, D.C. for the 2024 AHA Annual Membership Meeting.
We continue to press Congress, the Administration and UnitedHealth Group to step up their efforts to respond to this unprecedented incident.