What US Budget Cuts To Global Health Could Mean For Future Funding

On May 23, 2017, President Donald Trump released his FY 2018 budget request to Congress that includes approximately $2.5 billion in cuts to global health. These cuts had been foreshadowed in the administration’s earlier “Budget Blueprint,” which sought “deep cuts to foreign aid” to “free up funding for critical priorities here at home and put America first.” Cuts to global health of this magnitude would be unprecedented and, while they already face opposition in Congress, provide a key statement of administration policy in an already constrained budget environment. In this post, we seek to assess what such a reduction by the United States might mean in the larger, global context of development assistance for health (DAH). To do this, we started with a recent Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) analysis that forecasted future DAH; the analysis, published in The Lancet, was based on historical trends and relationships with key covariates, such as gross domestic product, observed in data spanning from 1990 to 2016 (Note 1). The analysis projected increases in DAH from the US government and was used to assess how many resources would be available for health in each country well into the future. For this post, we used the same modeling methods but assumed a one-year cut in the US global health budget of 24 percent, the reduction proposed by the president, followed by constant funding. We also modeled two more moderate cuts. We compared these results to...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Costs and Spending Featured Global Health Policy development assistance for health Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Source Type: blogs