Published 3 March 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b892
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b892

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Healthcare reform forms a big part of Obama’s budget

Janice Hopkins Tanne

1 New York

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Barack Obama’s proposed $3.1 trillion budget includes $634bn (£450bn; {euro}500bn) for healthcare reform, including universal health insurance coverage, electronic medical records, and preventive health care.

He has nominated Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, the Democratic governor in a Republican state, as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, and will convene a White House healthcare summit meeting this week.

The president presented the budget on 26 February, two days after the Institute of Medicine released a report, called America’s Uninsured Crisis: Consequences for Health and Health Care (available at www.iom.edu). The report says that nearly 46 million Americans lack health insurance, including one in five adults aged under 65 years and one in 10 children, and that numbers would increase as the economy worsened. It says, "For decades the health insurance crisis has grown without any decisive action by policy makers to stop it. Now is the time . . . [Full text of this article]


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