President Biden submitted his Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 budget request to Congress on March 28, 2022. The budget request is not binding on Congress. Rather, it may serve as a guide for both Congress and the administration as they consider spending issues and priorities for the upcoming fiscal year. The budget gives HHS $127 billion in discretionary spending and $1.6 trillion in mandatory funding. Among other provisions, the President’s budget aims to strengthen access to mental health care, increase spending in nursing and behavioral health workforce development, bolster pandemic preparedness, invest in healthcare research, expand support of telehealth, and spend more on the 340B program.
MENTAL HEALTH
The FY 2023 budget aims to increase access to mental health care. The budget allots funding to mental health programs and policies, which include investing in workforce development and service expansion, eliminating Medicare’s 190-day lifetime limit psychiatric services coverage, and increasing coverage for behavioral health care without cost-sharing in both the Medicare and private insurance market. The budget also includes increased enforcement of the mental health parity law and the establishment of a new $7.5 billion Mental Health Transformation Fund for mental health workforce development and expansion of services.
WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
In addition to the mental health workforce development described above, the budget proposes investments in the National Health Service Corps, nursing workforce development, diversity-related training, and public health and preventive medicine programs. However, the budget calls for a decrease in funding for graduate medical education at children’s hospitals.
PANDEMIC PREPAREDNESS
The budget also allots $81.7 million in mandatory funding across multiple HHS operating divisions to fund pandemic preparedness. The money would be distributed among the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). ASPR would be directed to spend $40 billion of that distribution on vaccine, therapeutic, and diagnostic research for certain high-priority viruses, build up the public health workforce, and increase medical countermeasure manufacturing.
HEALTHCARE RESEARCH & INNOVATION
A proposed investment of $5 billion for Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPHA-H) would be initially focused on cancer, diabetes, and dementia research. The budget allots $92 million for healthcare research at the CDC and FDA in order to fund the Cancer Moonshot program. This program aims to reduce cancer deaths by at least 50% over the next 25 years. In combination with other funding requests for the NIH, the total requested budget for healthcare research and innovation is $49 billion.
TELEHEALTH
The budget proposes an extension for Medicare’s coverage of telehealth beyond the end of the pandemic. The budget also includes a $45 million request for the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to promote telehealth, an increase over the actual FY 2022 budget for HRSA’s telehealth funding.
340B DRUG PRICING PROGRAM
The budget includes a $6 million increase over the FY 2022 enacted budget for the 340B program, for a total request of $17 million in spending. The budget also includes language that would increase oversight of the 340B program but does not include specific details on regulatory requirements for oversight.
More details about the healthcare-related proposals in the budget are available in the HHS Budget in Brief document, which is available here. President Biden’s budget request is available here.
