Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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San Francisco Examiner - April 12, 2000
Judy Holland, Examiner Washington Bureau
Pelosi said San Francisco stood to lose about $8 million from the Ryan White Care program, which provides care and medication for people with HIV and AIDS, unless Congress continues to provide The City with a special exception to the funding formula.
"We simply can't afford to have an increase in the unmet needs" of people with HIV and AIDS, Pelosi said. "The Bay Area would be hit very hard by this." She said the move to eliminate special treatment for San Francisco was "something we have to fight" to ensure that "The City does not have a disruption in service."
The lobbying is heating up as Congress prepares to extend the Ryan White Care Act for five more years. This program, named for a teenager who died of AIDS in 1990, authorizes federal money for care and medication for people who aren't poor or sick enough to receive Medicaid, but who don't have private insurance.
The program serves about half a million people each year and, since 1991, has distributed $6.4 billion to states and local governments for local use. Wednesday, the Senate Health, Labor and Human Services Committee was expected to complete its draft of the legislation.
The last time Congress updated the law, it included a provision that maintained funding levels for San Francisco so that the city's AIDS program wouldn't be decimated by a new formula based on the total number of people living with AIDS rather than the cumulative number of AIDS cases over the years.
Other jurisdictions with high numbers of people with HIV or full-blown AIDS are challenging this set-aside, but Pelosi wants the final bill to include language that would freeze San Francisco's share of the money at within 2 percent of the current $35.3 million.
"It seems to me that this is something that we have to fight and can't settle for anything less than the 2 percent," Pelosi said. "We never fought in our fight for AIDS treatment, prevention and research in any parochial way. It's hard to understand why those of us who have been fighting the hardest should have our city take a hit."
Pelosi said if the San Francisco exception were dropped, California would suffer a net loss of about $7 million.
"It's unfathomable and unthinkable that we would even have to settle for this," Pelosi said. "This is unfortunate that this is happening within our state."
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