Secure Fence Act of 2006--Resumed
SECURE FENCE ACT OF 2006--Resumed -- (Senate - September 28, 2006)
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Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I rise to support the effort to call up and immediately adopt S. 2823, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Modernization Act.
Adoption of this legislation offers us the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people in the United States who are living with HIV/AIDS. We should not let this opportunity pass.
I am pleased to have joined HELP Committee Chairman Enzi and Ranking Minority Member Kennedy, Majority Leader Frist, and Senators DeWine and Burr in introducing this reauthorization bill.
As my colleagues are aware, I was the author of the original legislation along with Senator Kennedy and we introduced the first bill on this issue in the 101st Congress. The Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act of 1990 was signed into public law on August 18, 1990 and became--excluding Medicaid and Medicare--the United States' largest Federally funded program for the care of those living with HIV and AIDS. It was a lot of hard work. But it was a lot of hard work for a very important cause.
Let us take a moment to remember one of the reasons why we did all that hard work in the first place. His name was Ryan White. Ryan was born in Kokomo, IN, in 1971. Three days after his birth, he was diagnosed with severe hemophilia. Fortunately for Ryan and his parents, there was a new blood-based product just approved by the Food and Drug Administration called Factor VIII, which contains the clotting agent found in blood.
While he was growing up, Ryan had many bleeds or hemorrhages in his joints which were very painful. A bleed occurs from a broken blood vessel or vein. Think of a water balloon. When the blood has nowhere to go, it swells up in a joint and creates painful pressure. Twice a week, Ryan would receive injections or IVs of Factor VIII, which clotted the blood and then broke it down.
In December of 1984, Ryan was battling severe pneumonia and had to have surgery to have 2 inches of his left lung removed. Two hours after the surgery, doctors told his mother that he had contracted AIDS as a result of his biweekly treatment with Factor VIII. He was given 6 months to live.
Ryan White was a fighter. He was determined to continue at his school and live life normally. But in 1985, not many people knew the truth about AIDS. Not very much was known about AIDS at all. Most of the so-called facts that people claimed to know were speculation. So Ryan faced a lot of discrimination, mostly based on the unknown.
Ryan was soon expelled from his high school because of the supposed health risk to other students. His situation became one of the most controversial cases in North America, with AIDS activists lobbying to have him reinstated while attempting to explain to the public that AIDS cannot be transmitted by casual contact.
After legal battles, Ryan and his mother settled with the school to have separate restrooms and use disposable silverware from the cafeteria. He agreed to drink from separate water fountains and no longer used the high school gymnasium.
But those concessions didn't stop much. Students vandalized his locker. Some restaurants threw his dishes away after he left. A bullet was even fired into his home.
Later, Ryan transferred to a different school where he was well-received by faculty and students who were fully educated into the nature of HIV. Ryan was a great student with an exceptional work ethic and perseverance. He was respected by his fellow students because of his admirable traits. They understood he was a human being--just like them, but living with a terrible disease.
Before he died on April 8, 1990, Ryan White worked to educate people on the nature of HIV and AIDS, to show that it was not a lifestyle disease and that, with a few precautions, it was safe to associate with people who were HIV-positive. His character sought to overcome stigma. He became an inspiration to patients and advocates throughout the United States and the rest of the world.
By the spring of 1990, over 128,000 people had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States and 78,000 had died of the disease.
The Ryan White CARE Act was originally enacted in 1990 in response to the need for HIV primary care and support services. At that time, the focus of public policy was on research, public education, surveillance, and prevention. The CARE Act was the first approach developed to help people with HIV and AIDS to obtain primary care and support services to save and improve their lives. There is no doubt that the CARE Act has played a critical role in the Nation's response to the AIDS epidemic.
The CARE Act was reauthorized in 1996 and 2000 to address the fact that the epidemic continued to spread and that primary care and support services provided through the act were still vitally important to people living with HIV and AIDS.
Today, more than 944,000 cases of AIDS have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and prevention, the CDC. Nearly 530,000 men, women, and children have died as the epidemic has spread over the last 25 years to both new populations and new geographic areas.
The public health burden and the economic burden of the AIDS epidemic have not been reduced since the CARE Act was passed. The continued need for services grows faster than the resources available.
Steady expansion and shifted demographics of the epidemic and the increasing survival rates for people living with AIDS have increased the stress on local health care systems in some areas. This strain is felt both in urban centers, where the epidemic continues to rage, and in smaller cities and rural areas, where the epidemic is expanding rapidly.
This reauthorization bill addresses those inequities and reevaluates funding formulas so that money for the program follows the epidemic. It keeps money for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program--known as ADAP--within ADAP, and even grants States flexibility to transfer funds to ADAP when they have demonstrated need. Currently, funds for the ADAP supplemental pool are frequently dipped into for other purposes, resulting in inadequate funding and waiting lists. It also protects States and eligible metropolitan areas from suffering catastrophic losses in funding.
I know that it is never easy to revise a bill that contains funding formulas. No matter what changes we make, they will always raise issues and questions. But let us move beyond the narrow fight and work for the greater good.
We have been talking a lot about numbers and codes and case counts and reporting data, but we need to remember that there are actual real people being affected by this, real people who need our help. Hundreds of thousands of people continue to live affected with and die from this disease, and we need to bring out all the tools within the Federal arsenal to help fight for them.
As of December 31, 2005, the Utah Department of Health reported a total of 1,907 people living with HIV and AIDS in the State of Utah. Many of these individuals rely on Title II funding from the Ryan White Program to receive health care, vital medications and support services.
These individuals are also counting on me to fight for their continued access to care and services that have such a big impact on their survival and quality of life. We in Congress are being counted on to work together on behalf of the nearly 1 million people living with HIV/AIDS in our country.
The last reauthorization period for the Ryan White Program expired in 2005. It is incredibly important that we reauthorize the program again now in order to continue providing the care that is so critical to these populations and alleviate strain from shifts in the epidemic felt by health care providers.
There are real people counting on us. We need to move forward in reauthorizing the only Federal program that helps the neediest of people living with this devastating disease. This bill extends the availability of vital services, and it includes changes that intend to fix discrepancies that have resulted in Ryan White funds not following the epidemic.
This is a good bill and I urge my colleagues to support it.
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