President Obama’s new budget isn’t due out until later today, but there’s already a bunch of coverage looking at what’s coming. Here are a few things to expect on health spending:
The budget includes an extra $25 billion in Medicaid funding for states, the WSJ reports. States share the cost of Medicaid with the feds; the budget includes a six-month extension of the Medicaid funding increase that was part of last year’s stimulus bill. Many states had planned on receiving extra Medicaid funding from the Dems’ big health-care bill, but the future of that legislation has been murky since the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate.
Funding for the Department of Health and Human Services will increase “in the range of inflation or less,” according to Politico. But NIH funding would grow by about $1 billion, or 3%. Community health centers, Head Start and a teen pregnancy program would also see increases, Politico says.
On global health, the budget will “devote new funding to reducing deaths from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth, poor nutrition and common treatable illnesses that kill millions every year, particularly women and children,” the WSJ says. The budget will continue to fund global AIDS programs, but will try to allow more integration of health-care programs, so patients don’t have to go to one clinic for HIV treatments and another for, say, prenatal care.
Of course, the big health-care spending is locked in by core funding of Medicare and Medicaid. The Senate recently voted against creating a bipartisan commission that would look at funding for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as part of a broader effort to rein in the deficit. But Obama is still pushing for such a commission.
Photo: Associated Press