Amednews.com (02/20/12) Fiegl, Charles
The $3.8 trillion budget proposed by the current administration for fiscal year 2013 seeks to replace deep mandatory health spending cuts, with targeted spending decreases of $360 billion. The budget drops the across-the-board cut of $1.2 trillion known as sequestration, while meeting the savings targets of sequestration, which also forced the administration to slow spending on the budget. Alan Krueger, chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, notes that keeping the deep automatic cuts would have been a bad policy move, similar to the bad policy associated with Medicare's SGR formula. Lawmakers have agreed to a deal that would keep a 27 percent pay cut from affecting Medicare at the beginning of March, but the budget calls for a full repeal of SGR, though it does not provide details on how the costs of repealing the formula would be handled. The budget is only a guideline, as the funding will be set by House and Senate appropriators who rarely take guidance from a congressional budget. The budget called for $22 trillion in entitlement spending over the next decade, and would lower future deficits, by reducing Medicare spending by $302.8 billion between 2013 and 2022. Also included was a proposal to shrink Medicaid funds by $21.8 billion.

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