HIV/AIDS Treatment
HIV/AIDS TREATMENT -- (Senate - September 29, 2006)
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Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank the Senator. Chairman Enzi has done a fine job, and he is known for his fairness and his hard work. Under his leadership, State after State has agreed to this new and fairer formula. Unfortunately, we have a few privileged States who want to maintain an extraordinary funding stream and are denying funding to the other States that are in crisis today.
I have spoken with Kathie Hiers, the director of AIDS Alabama, who is very articulate on these issues, Mary Elizabeth Marr, who runs the AIDS center in Huntsville, and Jane Cheeks, the State AIDS director, and they have explained to me how unfair the current system is.
Mr. President, I could not be prouder to serve on the committee with Senator Enzi, and I greatly appreciate his leadership to help those of us whose States are facing a national crisis.
I would like to briefly show this chart and make a few points. Senator Hatch, who wrote the Ryan White Act, is here. Ryan White was from Indiana. He was not from a large city. But Senator Hatch considered the AIDS challenges facing America, and at the time, this disease appeared to be a greater problem in bigger cities. The whole Nation contributed money to fight this epidemic in the crisis area cities.
The money that was spent fighting AIDS in these cities had a tremendous impact. However, the geography of the disease has changed. Where is the growth of AIDS today? Where are the surging numbers? HIV and AIDS are increasing at a greater rate in the South. Seventy percent of the new HIV cases in my State are African Americans, and the greatest growth rate by far is among African American women. My State is not receiving adequate funding to treat the greater numbers of people in our State that are living with HIV/AIDS.
I would like to again point out that the formula used to determine funding has a number of serious flaws. One of these flaws is that we count AIDS cases for funding, but we do not count HIV positive cases, despite the fact that HIV is the precursor to fully-developed AIDS. In contrast to the early years of this disease, we have medicines that can be given to people who have HIV before it has developed into AIDS. These drugs have been proven to delay the onset of AIDS so that the people that have access to them can live a more healthy life.
How is it possible that we are not including the people who have HIV in the funding formula?
These are the people that need to be put on medicines at once. We now know that a pregnant women who has HIV will give birth to a child without AIDS if she is given the right medicines. However, if she is not given these drugs, she faces a greater probability that her child could be born with AIDS. This clearly is a very serious, life-and-death issue, and one that we must confront. We have continued to be generous with AIDS funding, but that generosity certainly would require that we shift the money to follow the disease. The money should not follow bureaucracies and established systems where it cannot be spent. For example, New York was not able to spend $29 million last year, yet under the same formula, Alabama receives only $11 million for the whole State for the entire year. The money that they had and were unable to spend is nearly 3 times more than our complete funding, yet Alabama has waiting lists for people who are in desperate need of these drugs. The people on our waiting lists must wait before they can become eligible for these drugs because we don't have enough money to pay for them. We cannot afford to pay for more than 40 drugs in Alabama, but New York is able to provide nearly 500 drugs to their AIDS patients. This is just not right.
To conclude, I find it unfortunate that we have seen such partisan, parochial interest in protecting those who receive excessive federal benefits when these benefits are no longer justified. The U.S. Government and the American people were generous to New York, San Francisco, and other big cities. We saw that these cities were in a crisis with this disease, and so we gave them a disproportionate amount. These cities are not entitled to keep forever the benefits we have been giving, and now we are experiencing crises in other States. I think it is a sad day indeed that there are Senators blocking this reform and blocking the re-authorization of the act.
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