From Families USA, February 2007
The Bush Administration's Fiscal Year 2008 Budget:
Analysis of Key Health Care Provisions
On February 5, 2007, President Bush released his proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2008, which begins on October 1, 2007. While the President explicitly recognized the growing health care crisis in his budget plan, he failed to offer meaningful solutions. Instead, the President proposed drastic cuts to Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), as well as to Medicare. These cuts will increase the number of uninsured people in our nation. Further, his private market initiatives will direct billions of scarce federal dollars to the healthy and wealthy while providing no help at all to the majority of the uninsured, who pay no taxes and who often face the highest costs for medical care if they become sick.
This budget, like last year’s, offers clear insight into the Bush Administration’s overall view of the health care system in this country and what should be done to make health care more available and more affordable. Across the board, in Medicaid and Medicare, as well as in the arena of private insurance, the Administration’s proposals would move Americans away from the existing system in which risk is shared among the sick and the healthy alike and toward an increasingly privatized system in which individuals, especially those who are older or sicker, bear more of the financial burden.
The President’s cure for the ills of our health care system consists of proposals that will shift costs away from government and business and onto the shoulders of individual consumers. These proposals, which are designed to move consumers who have private insurance away from employer-based coverage and into the individual insurance market, as well as to encourage privatization in Medicaid and Medicare, are described more fully in the sections listed below.
In addition to these proposals, the President’s budget seeks more cuts in federal health care programs. The funding level he has proposed for SCHIP falls far short of what is needed to allow states to sustain current enrollment. What’s more, his proposed funding is insufficient to enroll any of the nearly 7 million children who are already eligible for SCHIP or Medicaid but who remain uninsured. His proposals pile more cuts onto Medicaid—in addition to the drastic cuts contained in the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA), which he signed into law in February 2006. As for Medicare, the President’s proposed budget contains arbitrary reductions in provider payments and shifts more costs to beneficiaries.
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