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| President Bush proposed cutting $4 million from the federal budget
on AIDS prevention and surveillance programs, but asked Congress to increase the
budget by $38 million for programs that teach youth to abstain from sex until
marriage. (Photo by AP)
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HOME > NEWS > NATIONAL NEWS
By: LOU CHIBBARO JR. COMMENTS
The proposed 2006 budget that President Bush submitted to Congress this week calls
for cutting funds for federal AIDS prevention and surveillance programs by $4
million, a development that drew sharp criticism from AIDS activists.
Activists said they were especially concerned that the proposed cuts came at
the same time the president is calling for a $38 million increase in programs
aimed at curtailing AIDS and teen pregnancy by promoting sexual abstinence until
marriage.
“Programs which focus on abstinence as the sole means of preventing HIV/AIDS
put our young people at tremendous risk,” said David Smith, an official
with the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay political group that lobbies
Congress on AIDS.
Smith and other gay and AIDS activists said abstinence-only programs, which
ban discussion of safer-sex procedures such as condom use, are harmful to gay
youth who can’t marry and often don’t have access to information
about AIDS.
The Bush budget calls for a $10 million increase in funding for the AIDS Drug
Assistance Program, or ADAP, which provides life-sustaining AIDS drugs to low
income people who don’t have private health insurance. But the president’s
budget calls for no additional funds for all other parts of the Ryan White CARE,
the sweeping federal statute that created ADAP and other programs to provide
care and treatment to low-income people with HIV and AIDS.
Activists said the proposed “flat funding” of Ryan White programs
is equivalent to a cut in funds because of rising costs in medical care and
the growing number of people with HIV and AIDS in the United States.
The president’s call for cutting the Medicaid program by an average of
$4.5 billion a year over the next decade will create even more hardship for
low-income people with HIV, activists said. Medicaid serves as the single largest
provider of medical care to people with AIDS in the U.S.
Although the president mentioned how AIDS has hit minority communities the
hardest in his Sate of the Union speech, he proposed no additional funding for
the government’s Minority AIDS Initiative, a program that targets African
Americans and other communities of color for AIDS prevention and treatment efforts.
The budget submitted to Congress by Bush also proposes a $14 million cut in
the Housing Opportunities for People With AIDS, or HOPWA, program. The program
provides housing subsidies for low-income people with HIV or AIDS.
In his budget message to Congress, Bush said he was initiating a 1 percent
cut in spending on discretionary domestic programs in an effort to reduce the
federal budget deficit by one-half by 2009.
“It meets our nation’s essential needs,” he said.
A statement released by the White House notes that the president’s budget
calls for spending more than $17 billion for domestic AIDS “treatment,
prevention, and research, including almost $21 million for Ryan White programs
and its comprehensive approach to address the health needs of persons living
with HIV/AIDS.”
The White House statement stressed that the 2006 budget would continue to fund
Bush’s $15 billion global AIDS relief program, which calls for spending
that amount over a five-year period.
“The president’s 2006 budget proposal supports the status quo,
but what is really necessary at this juncture is an infusion of cash similar
to what we saw with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief: real
money and swift action,” the national AIDS advocacy group AIDS Action
said in a statement.
Christopher Labonte, HRC’s legislative director, said HRC would join
gay and AIDS groups to call on Congress to add more funds to the AIDS programs
that Bush wants to cut. Labonte said HRC was hopeful that Congress would at
least restore the cuts Bush is proposing for AIDS prevention programs run by
the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
“We have to be clear that the president’s message of compassion
about AIDS in his State of the Union address was not reflected in his budget,”
Labonte said.
Gay Republican activist Carl Schmid, who lobbies Congress on behalf of the
AIDS Institute, a national group based in Florida, said the group was disappointed
in the president’s funding proposals on AIDS.
“They say they want to decrease the number of infections, but they are
decreasing the funding on prevention,” Schmid said. “We obviously
need more money in prevention.”
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