President Obama is getting ready to release his budgetary proposals as they relate to healthcare. On Thursday, he will announce his fiscal year 2010 budget but will keep specifics to a minimum, announcing those in the early spring. But what is most interesting is that Obama will most certainly make his announcement a very transparent one, presenting an almost $2.7 trillion increased total which appears as high because he will apparently not be resorting to Bush administration methods which used some accounting techniques to create a falsely lower budget total. These accounting “gimmicks”, as Obama refers to them, involve Medicare reimbursements to physicians, revenue from the alternative minimum tax, expenditures for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush administration budgeted less than actual costs for payments to physicians, and Congress regularly waived a law mandating the lower reimbursements for fear that doctors would quit serving beneficiaries in protest, according to the NYT. Of Course, we’ll find out more as he prepares for his healthcare policy summit. | LINK

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