Mayors Johnson and Reardon in Roll Call: "Health Investment for Cities, Nation is Smart"

In Roll Call today, Mayors Johnson (Hernando, Mississippi) and Reardon (Wyandotte, Kansas) called for more investment in local public health and prevention throughout the country. They  both used the County Health Rankings to find where their local health investments will see the highest rate of return.

It has been said that politics makes strange bedfellows, and our unlikely pairing may be Exhibit A: the Republican mayor of Hernando, Miss., and the Democratic mayor of Wyandotte County, Kan. We may be 500 miles apart and have traveled different paths on this journey, but we both share a passion for helping those who live in our areas become healthier and more productive. As in most cities and towns across our nation, our residents fight tooth and nail to make ends meet. But we’ve both found that investing in health and prevention not only helps our friends’ and neighbors’ quality of life, it also gives our limited budgets the most bang for their buck.

We’re proud that the stories of Hernando and Wyandotte have been featured by County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a program of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that measures the health of virtually every county in the United States based on a variety of factors, from access to healthy food or opportunities for physical activity, to education and jobs. We have used that information to see precisely where our investments will get the highest rate of return.

• Read the whole article in Roll Call
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