WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 (UPI) -- The Department of Health and Human Services budget proposal for the coming fiscal year calls for significant funding increases to combat bioterrorism and the largest one-year increase ever for the National Institutes of Health.
HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson Monday said President Bush's budget for HHS during fiscal 2003 totals $489 billion, nearly a quarter of all federal spending and a 6.3 percent increase over 2002.
Last fall's anthrax outbreak made bioterrorism a top priority for the federal government. One of the biggest components of the budget -- a total of $4.3 billion and a 45 percent increase from fiscal 2002 -- would go toward preparing the country at the national, state and local levels for another bioterrorism attack.
The National Institutes of Health will receive $1.7 billion alone for research into new vaccines and diagnostic tools and protecting its own facilities.
Funding increases also are allocated to the Food and Drug Administration, including $98 million toward overseeing the safety of the nation's food supply, and to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta so it can upgrade laboratory facilities and boost its own security.
"The president is committed to making sure we're prepared to handle it (a bioterrorist attack) successfully," Thompson said.
The agency receiving one of the biggest slices of the fiscal pie is the NIH, the nation's most prestigious medical research agency that serves as an umbrella for numerous other research branches. The Bush administration is proposing a budget request of $27.3 billion, an increase of $3.7 billion or just under 16 percent from 2002 and double the amount it was for 1998.
While a good chunk would go toward bioterrorism research, Thompson said money also is being reserved for studying medical advances in the areas of cancer, HIV/AIDS and other chronic, life-threatening diseases. When asked what portion of the proposed budget could go toward stem-cell research, Thompson replied, "Stem cell research is going to have a healthy increase ... the exact dollars, I don't know." Those figures, Thompson said, will be determined by NIH.
Stem cell research has been a prickly issue for this administration. Scientists have argued stem cells, which are immature cells, have the capacity to become treatments for a host of debilitating diseases, such as those mentioned in the budget.
"You have to come home with a very optimistic point of view that the government is behind scientists," Dr. W. Dalton Dietrich, scientific director of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and an advocate of stem-cell research, told United Press International. "That the government wants scientists in United States to be able to compete with scientists in the world and to make these important discoveries in health."
Bush also is calling for $89 billion to assist the uninsured. Given the economic recession, with people losing their jobs and their health care coverage, Thompson called the proposal a necessity.
Bush wants to encourage increased health insurance coverage in the private sector so the administration is proposing refundable tax credits for low-income individuals and families who are not covered under an employee health plan nor enrolled in public programs that offer health care.
Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA countered, in a prepared statement, such tax credits are "far too small to make health coverage affordable for low-income workers."
Other groups were not praising the proposed budget either. Planned Parenthood Federation of America was particularly disappointed with a $33 million increase in expanding abstinence-only sex education, a 100 percent increase from the previous year.
"Abstinence-only so-called education has not been shown to be effective," Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told UPI. "The federal government is already now, before this increase, spending more than $100 million a year on an unproven, ineffective, actually dangerous means of keeping young people ignorant of things you need to know."
Adolescents taught in abstinence-only programs, she said, could be vulnerable to unintended pregnancies and contracting sexual transmitted diseases.
Cuts are proposed for international family planning groups. "Women in the United States and around the world will suffer the consequences of the Bush budget," Feldt said.
The budget includes $12.9 billion to fight HIV and AIDS -- an increase of $906 million, or 8 percent. It also allocates a $200 million contribution by the United States to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. So far, $100 million was pledged for fiscal 2001 and $200 million for fiscal 2002. Thompson said the U.S. commitment includes $100 million from HHS and another $100 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
David Bryden, spokesman for the Global AIDS Alliance in Washington, told UPI the amount will please neither Republicans or Democrats in Congress.
"I will say many in Congress will be disappointed as 99 just wrote to Bush appealing for a $1 billion commitment to the global fund," Bryden said. "It (AIDS funding) needs to be in the billions. It ($200 million) can be utilized, there is no question, but when you look at scope, you look at something that needs to be invested in the billions."
