Sequestration’s Impact on Healthcare Goes Way Beyond Medicare Reimbursement — Could a Cure for Cancer be on the Chopping Block?

Sequestration is a dirty word for many hospitals. The automatic, 2 percent spending cuts to hospitals’ reimbursement from the federal government — required by the Budget Control Act of 2011 — put additional pressure on hospitals’ already tight margins.
Reduced Medicare payments are the most obvious impact of sequestration on hospitals, but the impact is actually much more devastating.
Sequestration has brought on serious cuts to funding for medical research, effectively stopping certain research efforts at some academic medical centers’ (and their affiliated universities). A CNN article from earlier this week illustrated the impact of the cuts on National Institutes of Health-funded research — and the picture the article painted is bleak.
Here are two telling excerpts from the article describing the impact:
“At the University of Chicago, 3 laboratories have closed, costing six medical researchers jobs treating cancer, healing wounds and gastrointestinal problems.”
“At Arkansas State University, 30 scientists and researchers have lost or will lose jobs by October.”
The article also cites two research programs investigating new HIV treatments and a synthetic version of heparin that are at risk of losing funding.