February 27th, 2009

Reports Reuters:

President Barack Obama’s new budget includes more than $1 billion to help the U.S. Food and Drug Administration strengthen its food safety efforts, $6 billion for cancer research and a program to send nurses to the homes of new mothers to check their babies.

The $76.8 billion allocated to the Health and Human Services Department also stresses, as Obama has said before, the adoption of healthcare information technology such as electronic medical records and a controversial plan to compare medical treatments head to head to find what works best.

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Obama’s budget suggests that spending up front to get coverage for more of America’s 46 million uninsured people will save cash if patients get preventive care and avoid expensive and chronic diseases.

The FDA has been under fire for several years for failing to protect the U.S. food supply from some high-profile outbreaks of foodborne illness — most recently the spread of salmonella food poisoning to 666 people in 44 states, traced to peanut plants with a poor history of inspections.

The budget includes $1 billion for the FDA to “increase and improve inspections, domestic surveillance, laboratory capacity and domestic response to prevent and control foodborne illness.”

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The budget includes $1.1 billion for new reviews of competing drugs, treatments and head-to-head trials of drugs. The move is based on several recent studies that have shown cheaper and often generic drugs sometimes work better than new, patented and expensive medicines.

The budget also suggests that the Obama administration plans to negotiate with drug makers to lower drug prices, as the European Union and Canada now do.

Read more at Reuters.