Dear President Biden,

On behalf of the 135 Champions and Partners supporting the 9^th annual Obesity Care Week, we want to thank you and your administration for convening the first White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in over 50 years. During the conference, you unveiled your national strategy to address hunger, nutrition, and physical activity as avenues for addressing prevention of diet-related diseases such as diabetes, high cholesterol, and obesity.

We appreciate that your strategy supports current efforts to “expand evidence-based nutrition and obesity counseling benefits to Medicare beneficiaries with additional conditions and to allow appropriate providers to offer obesity screening and behavioral counseling to help patients lose weight… and that HHS CMS will also examine existing Medicare authorities on ways to increase access to nutrition and obesity counseling.” Behavioral counseling is fundamental to any obesity-treatment plan and expanding the professionals who can provide this service is an important step forward.

During Obesity Care Week, we are hopeful that your administration will take additional steps to ensure that the over 130 million Americans affected by obesity can access the care that they need by:

• Providing an update regarding your efforts to expand evidence-based nutrition and obesity counseling benefits to Medicare beneficiaries.
• Expanding the Medicare Part D program to cover FDA-approved anti-obesity medications (AOMs). Throughout the last decade, FDA has approved a number of AOMs with the most recent ones showing excellent safety and promise, with average weight loss greatly exceeding the minimums that often lead to improved health. FDA is also moving to approve additional AOMs soon, which will give healthcare professionals many more tools to treat those affected by the disease of obesity.
• Encouraging the Medicare program to follow the lead of your Office of Personnel Management, which has already recognized the importance of AOMs and now requires federal employee health insurers to cover them. It is critical that you use your administrative authority to lift this dated and discriminatory roadblock to this critical treatment avenue. It is important that all Americans have access to the full continuum of obesity treatment options.

Obesity Care Week gives us the opportunity to shine a light on the hurdles that people face when seeking obesity care, and educate and empower decision makers and the public to support changing the way we care for obesity. It’s time to acknowledge obesity for the chronic disease that it is, and take steps to treat it in the same serious fashion as other chronic disease states such as diabetes and hypertension. Now is the time to prioritize obesity care and stop weight bias!

Thank you for your support,