Budget

President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget includes a wide-ranging collection of Medicare proposals that the administration says would add eight years to the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund, including reducing bad debt and uncompensated care payments to hospitals, moving closer to site-neutral payments among providers and creating a primary care pay bump by cutting reimbursement for other physician services.

The Trump administration is doubling down on some of its most controversial Medicaid policies by proposing in its 2020 budget to impose mandatory work requirements, make it easier for states to eliminate non-emergency medical transportation, and allow higher copayments when beneficiaries seek non-emergency care at the emergency room.

President Donald Trump’s 2020 budget, released Monday (March 11), would cut $1.5 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade by proposing mandatory work requirements nationwide, repealing Medicaid expansion and proposing block grants or per-capita caps for states.

President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget again calls for giving the Health Resources and Services Administration more authority over the 340B program, creating a user-fee program and tying Medicare reimbursement for 340B drugs to hospitals’ uncompensated care percentages.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar will testify about drug prices Tuesday (March 12) at a House Energy & Commerce health subcommittee hearing on the president’s 2020 budget, which the administration will unveil Monday, according to an E&C release.

FDA stakeholders are applauding the $269 million increase in FDA funding included in a government spending package to be voted on Thursday (Feb. 14) to avert another shutdown.

Despite warnings from the medical device industry that FDA would be slammed by a backlog of medical product applications that piled up during the shutdown, a former FDA advisory told Inside Health Policy the agency’s user fee-funded activities should return to normal operations and workload shortly.

FDA drug center chief Janet Woodcock warned her staff on Monday (Jan. 28) that progress on rules and guidances might be slower than usual as the agency recovers from a month-long partial government shutdown that left 41 percent of its staff furloughed.

Top medical device lobbyists are pitching a legislative proposal that would let FDA accept user fees for new device applications during the partial federal government shutdown. Lobbyists say the proposal would prevent the agency’s device center from running out of funding during the shutdown and allow reviewers to work on a growing backlog of new device submissions.