Federal Budget

The President’s Fiscal Year 2017 (FY17) budget request, which was released on February 9, 2016, included $10.3 billion in total funding for global health programs. This marks the first time in three years that the request for global health is higher than the previous year enacted level, and represents the largest request since FY12. If enacted by Congress, it would represent the highest level of global health funding to date (excluding emergency funding for Ebola provided in FY15).

In response to rising drug costs, some policymakers and presidential candidates, including Republican Donald Trump and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have proposed allowing Medicare to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies over the price of prescription drugs, in contrast to the current approach under Medicare Part D drug where…

This brief examines the U.S. government’s efforts in global health security—that is, activities to help countries prepare for and develop capacities to address epidemic and pandemic diseases. It provides history and background, outlines the U.S. agencies carrying out these efforts, describes funding, and highlights key policy issues going forward.

With its inclusion in the House GOP health plan released last month, the idea of converting Medicare into a premium support system once again features prominently in Capitol Hill policy discussions about the future of Medicare, the federal health insurance program that covers 57 million seniors and people with disabilities.…

Premium support is a general term used to describe an approach to reform Medicare that aims to reduce the growth in Medicare spending. These FAQs raise and discuss basic questions about the possible effects of a premium support system for Medicare beneficiaries, the federal budget, health care providers, and private health plans.

Among beneficiaries who died in 2014, Medicare spent significantly more per person on medical services for seniors in their late sixties and early seventies than on older beneficiaries, according to a new data note from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The analysis comes at a time when physicians can now be…

This issue brief provides a landscape of the status of U.S. funding for Zika, a mosquito-transmitted infection that in pregnant women can cause microcephaly as well as other serious birth defects. The brief compares the Congressionally approved Zika funding levels, which provides $1.1 billion to the Zika response, to the President’s February 22nd request, the House and Senate bills that passed each chamber in May, and a Conference Agreement that had been approved by the House in June, but was blocked in the Senate and opposed by the Administration.

This blog post revisits an earlier analysis of the drug Sovaldi (sofosbuvir) using new data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and considers both the ongoing impact of hepatitis C drugs for Medicare Part D and the broader implications for Medicare of new high-priced drugs entering the market.

This Visualizing Health Policy infographic, produced in partnership with the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), provides a snapshot of Medicare and end-of-life care