The Obama Global Health Budget

by Alanna Shaikh · 2009-05-07 11:33:00 UTC
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(photo credit: Center for American Progress Action Fund)

I like the Obama budget. I like the specific mention of effective obstetric interventions and child health care, and its focus on building health systems instead of single-focus health initiatives. Here's my favorite quote "we will not be successful in our efforts to end deaths from AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis unless we do more to improve health systems around the world, focus our efforts on child and maternal health, and ensure that best practices drive the funding for these programs." This is true, this is important, and this approach is going to have much more impact on global health.

He also increases global health spending by 10%, which isn't honestly all that impressive. Most of that increase was already in the works from older budget planning. I think it's enough, though. It's a good sign of an ongoing commitment.

The budget doesn't substantially scale up PEPFAR, the Bush-era HIV effort, or PMI, Bush's President's Malaria Initiative, but it includes enough funding to sustain them. I would just as happy to see all funding return to a single global health account, instead of these single-disease efforts, but I can see the argument for keeping them. People living with AIDS depend on ARVs to keep them alive. Malaria efforts are finally making headway, and we don't want to lose that progress. While we could protect those efforts in a broader budget, I can see the bureaucratic advantage to maintaining their special account.

If you want to learn more about the budget, the Kaiser Family Foundation is doing a live webcast about it on May 14th.

Alanna Shaikh
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