Hillary’s HIV/AIDS mistake

While her husband addressed the World AIDS Conference in Toronto last week, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was hard at work with her own AIDS effort, albeit significantly more political and less noble. The senator is impeding reauthorization of the Ryan White act, the bill that provides nearly $2 billion each year to combat AIDS.

A new formula that distributes AIDS funding according to the current trends in HIV/AIDS infections, which Mrs. Clinton opposes, would send more money to rural communities in the South and less to New York and likely battleground states in the 2008 election, including Florida and Illinois. Whether to keep the federal funds flowing to her home state or for other electoral reasons, Mrs. Clinton should know it’s quite unbecoming of a probable presidential aspirant to play to her corner at the expense of national interests.

When the Ryan White act passed through the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, it did so with great bipartisan support and only Mrs. Clinton’s vote in dissent. Committee Chairman Mike Enzi noted that “Federal resources for HIV/AIDS, including those provided by the Ryan White CARE Act, should go where the epidemic is today and will be tomorrow, not where it was a decade ago.”

New York, California and Florida still have the largest cumulative number of AIDS cases, as well as the largest number of new AIDS cases. In California and Illinois, however, there were fewer new AIDS cases in 2004 than in 2000 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and while New York and Florida both saw more AIDS cases in 2004 than in 2000, the increase was lower as a percentage than the increase in Georgia. The new formula also looks beyond these statistics to consider new cases of HIV infection, which is primarily responsible for the shift of funding to states without the large cities that previously received one-third of AIDS funding.

New HIV/AIDS cases effect blacks at an even more disproportionate rate. In a letter to Mrs. Clinton, Harry C. Alford, president and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, wrote: “African Americans make up 19 percent of the South’s population, but accounted for over 60 percent of all new AIDS cases in 2003. Eight southern states have to treat the same number of people with HIV/AIDS as other states which get more funding under the outdated formulas.” Mrs. Clinton’s efforts, Mr. Alford’s letter continues, will “sentence African Americans in the rural South to three more years of waiting lists for AIDS drugs and vital services.”

In Toronto, Bill Clinton’s speech avoided crass partisanship in its call to work harder to address the global AIDS crisis. It’s a shame that Mrs. Clinton could not similarly put her own agenda aside for the sake of America’s struggle against AIDS.