Matt Hourihan Discusses the NIH Budget (May 23, 2013)
www.thehealthcarepolicypodcast.com
Listen Now After the doubling of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) budget between 1998 and 2003, federal funding for medical research and more widely federal R&D has been falling or stagnate over the past several years. Most recently, the federal budget sequester slashed NIH funding by 5.5 percent leading to a $1.6 billion funding reduction in 2013, the largest cut in the agency’s history. (The president's proposed 2014 budget calls for a repeal of sequestration and a slight increase in the NIH budget of 1.6 percent or $471 million over the 2012 budget.) The decline in federal research funding is particularly concerning in light of the growing importance of knowledge-based industries in a global economy. If current trends in biomedical research investment continue the US government's investment in life sciences research over the ensuring half decade is likely to be barely half that of China's in current dollars and one-quarter of China's level as a share of its GDP. (China already has more gene sequencing capacity than the US.) Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, the UK and France also fund more as share of their economies.
Matt Hourihan Discusses the NIH Budget (May 23, 2013)
Matt Hourihan Discusses the NIH Budget (May…
Matt Hourihan Discusses the NIH Budget (May 23, 2013)
Listen Now After the doubling of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) budget between 1998 and 2003, federal funding for medical research and more widely federal R&D has been falling or stagnate over the past several years. Most recently, the federal budget sequester slashed NIH funding by 5.5 percent leading to a $1.6 billion funding reduction in 2013, the largest cut in the agency’s history. (The president's proposed 2014 budget calls for a repeal of sequestration and a slight increase in the NIH budget of 1.6 percent or $471 million over the 2012 budget.) The decline in federal research funding is particularly concerning in light of the growing importance of knowledge-based industries in a global economy. If current trends in biomedical research investment continue the US government's investment in life sciences research over the ensuring half decade is likely to be barely half that of China's in current dollars and one-quarter of China's level as a share of its GDP. (China already has more gene sequencing capacity than the US.) Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, the UK and France also fund more as share of their economies.