Impact of the Sequester on Health Care: By the Numbers

By: Katie Booth 

The looming sequester will have a significant impact on health care, including cuts to Medicare, FDA, CDC, NIH, and Affordable Care Act programs. Budget cuts could slow down the drug approval process, impede the tracking of infectious diseases, and lead to layoffs for hundreds of thousands of workers in the health care sector. Read on for sequestration by the numbers…

Medicare:

  • Medicare cut by 2% ($11 billion) (not set to begin until April 1st, 2013, unlike other sequestration cuts, which are set to begin on March 1, 2013)
  • Physicians’ payments cut by 2%
  • Hospital Medicare reimbursement cut by $5.8 billion
  • Hospitals could end up with especially large cuts under the sequester because other parts of healthcare system run on longer term contracts
  • Loss of almost 500,000 health care sector jobs in the first year of the sequester according to an American Medical Association and American Hospital Association study, including job losses for 40,000 practitioners such as physicians and dentists

FDA:

  • FDA cut by 8% ($318 million)
  • FDA public funding cut by $206 million
  • FDA industry user fees cut by $112 million (for an interesting discussion of user fee cuts and the sequester, see Patrick O’Leary’s Bill of Health blog post)
  • Cuts by department (assuming 8% across-the-board cuts): $71 million to Foods, $39 million to Human Drugs, $17 million to Biologics, $11.3 million to Animal Drugs, and $26.5 million to Devices
  • Longer drug approval process is likely
  • Layoffs and furloughs likely
  • 2,100 fewer food safety inspections

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