My Washington correspondent reports that on Monday evening, the final conference report of the Labor-HHS bill was filed. She said:
I’ve been told that the conferees (the House-Senate negotiators) dropped the Ryan amendment – leaving funding for CDC’s Entertainment Education program intact. We’re pretty excited.The House is scheduled to approve the bill on Tuesday with the Senate following suit later this week. Then the bill will be sent to the President. He is expected to veto the bill (unrelated to our issue) because it spends more money than he’d like. Then the House and Senate will have to start all over again on the same bill.
That said… I think we can declare victory. I don’t think Rep. Ryan or Sen. Coburn will try to offer their amendments on a future Labor-HHS bill this year.
Yippee! She also felt that the pressure from the public health community was invaluable. So kudos to all of you who emailed, called or faxed to try to save entertainment education!
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Technorati Tags: cdc, hhs, senate, house, public health, entertainment education
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
We should definitely see this as another reason why collaborative efforts in the public health community actually DOES make a difference! Great news Nedra!