Bush's Budget Proposal Would Cut Medicare Spending

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Medicare is an inefficient system and needs to be changed, Leavitt charged. Changing the system means putting more responsibility into the hands of consumers, enabling them to make their own health-care decisions, he said.

"If consumers were allowed to make the decisions in an efficient market, through electronic medical records, through quality measures, through cost comparisons and choices and incentives, their decisions would be far more precise and wise," he said. "It would produce better health, and at a lower cost."

But at least one critic believes a shrinking Medicare budget would hurt consumers and the health-care system.

"President Bush's proposed cuts to Medicare would hurt older and disabled Americans and take a wrecking ball to many essential hospitals across the country," Robert M. Hayes, president of the Medicare Rights Center, said in a prepared statement. "It is indefensible for the President to propose hurting America's grandparents while maintaining his rabid defense of Medicare overpayments to for-profit health insurance companies."

Under the Bush proposed budget, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would receive an additional $130 million added for fiscal year 2009, which begins Oct. 1.

"The agency's 2009 budget includes $2.4 billion, which includes direct budget authority and user fees," John Dyer, FDA's deputy commissioner for operations and chief operating officer, said during a Monday afternoon teleconference. "That's a 5.7 percent increase over the 2008 budget just passed by Congress."

According to Dyer, the budget would increase resources spent on food safety, modernize drug safety, speed approval of generic drugs and improve the safety and review of medical devices. The budget also includes increases in salaries and up to 1,000 additional employees for the FDA.

The agency, which was shaken by a long list of food recalls and food-linked illness outbreaks in 2007, plans to boost its inspections of domestic and imported food, as well as medical products. It will also target more inspections of high-risk food items, Dyer said.