Copyright 2000 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
The San
Francisco Chronicle
JULY 27, 2000, THURSDAY, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A3
LENGTH: 522 words
HEADLINE:
House OKs Continued Funds for AIDS Care;
Revised formula would cut
S.F.'s share
BYLINE: Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle
Washington Bureau
DATELINE: Washington
BODY:
The House voted unanimously yesterday to
renew the Ryan White Care Act serving people with AIDS,
including a funding formula change that promises to reduce San Francisco's share
of the $1.6 billion now spent on the program.
The bill,
co-sponsored by Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles,
calls for a gradual shift over five years to focus on HIV infections rather than
full-blown AIDS cases. The bill also would change the funding formula in an
attempt to shift funds to areas where the disease is rising. The current act,
officially titled the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act,
will expire on September 30.
The Senate also passed, by unanimous
consent, legislation that would increase spending to combat international AIDS
and tuberculosis epidemics. It was sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
Under the current Ryan White formula, San Francisco receives
approximately twice as much money per AIDS case, roughly $5,000
a year, as other cities, including Oakland, even as the path of the epidemic has
spread across the country and shifted to heterosexual demographic groups,
particularly women and minorities.
AIDS groups in San Francisco warned
that the formula shift could slash San Francisco's Ryan White funds by as much
as 25 percent in five years.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, voted
for the overall bill, but strongly objected to the formula change.
"As
advocates for people living with the disease, we should be emphasizing that the
solution to the continuing AIDS crisis is to increase overall funding rather
than to redistribute existing dollars," Pelosi said.
Coburn predicted
that rapidly rising federal funding for the Ryan White money that goes to cities
-- which has increased by an annual average rate of 24 percent since 1991 --
will continue, so that San Francisco could wind up with no absolute cut in
funds, even as its share of the total falls.
Local AIDS groups sharply
disagreed, saying funding would have to double over the next five years for San
Francisco to stay even.
Many AIDS activists applauded some of the
changes in the House bill, particularly the focus on tracking HIV rather than
AIDS.
Dennis Dison, spokesman for AIDS Action, said his group's policy
committee "said some years ago that we want to see a shift to HIV data rather
than AIDS data."
Jim Driscoll, national AIDS policy adviser for the Log
Cabin Republicans, a gay group, said the House measure would "upgrade
prevention, improve accountability and attempts to make Ryan White programs more
responsive to minorities and women as well."
Driscoll said that when the
Ryan White law was enacted a decade ago, San Francisco was the center of the
AIDS epidemic, so the law "was written in a way that was very favorable to San
Francisco. That becomes very difficult to maintain as a broader and broader
constituency nationally has to be served by the program."
The Senate
version of the bill contains a smaller formula change that would have less of an
effect on San Francisco's funding.
E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at
lochheadc@sfgate.com.
LOAD-DATE: July 27, 2000
