A Closer Look At Health Care Budget Provisions
News reports delve into numerous other health-related provisions in the budget.
President Obama's health department budget for 2011 tops $911 billion and includes $1.4 billion for food-safety, $1.7 billion for fraud prevention, $500 million for vaccine development, and $32 billion for medical research, HealthDay/BusinessWeek reports (Reinberg, 2/1).
Kaiser Health News: "The Obama administration, in an effort to forge ahead with its sometimes-contentious effort to compare various medical treatments, is proposing a big boost in funding for the agency that oversees the research." The budget includes $286 million for comparative effectiveness at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
InformationWeek: The administration is requesting $78 million to help spread health information technology to more doctors and hospitals. The funding will build on the stimulus-spawned program to distribute $20-billion plus in incentives for providers to adopt electronic records (McGee, 2/1).
PharmaTimes: $38 million in new generic drug "user fees" will help the Food and Drug Administration pick up the pace on its reviews of generic drug approval applications. The budget also includes $51.5 billion in funding for the generic drug program (Taylor, 2/1).
Reuters: In addition to the health department's increased fraud and waste prevention funding, "The Obama administration is requesting a $96.8 million increase in the Department of Justice's fiscal 2011 budget to combat financial fraud, up 23 percent from fiscal 2010." Justice collaborates with the health department in a joint taskforce to take on health care fraud (Margolies, 2/1).
The New York Times: "The proposed budget, announced on Monday, now includes $6 billion for cancer research, intended to allow the [National Institutes of Health] to start 30 new drug trials and double the number of drugs and vaccines in clinical trials by 2016." That money comes as part of a $32-billion request for 2011, $1 billion more than this year (McNeil, 2/1).