The president’s proposed 2012 budget increase for HIV/AIDS prevention has large consequences for Florida, a state that has one of the nation’s highest rates of new HIV/AIDS cases every year. #
According to Carl Schmid, deputy executive director of The AIDS Institute, a 2012 budget proposal for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Ryan White program to set aside 1 percent of their budget to carry out the National HIV AIDS Strategy could help Florida with money directed toward prevention and care. #
Schmid says that another proposal in the budget that could help Florida is a change to how the CDC distributes its state prevention funding. #
“As of now, it is not done by formula,” Schmid says. “We have done some analysis, as well as the CDC and the state of Florida, and Florida is really not getting its fair share of funding for prevention.” He says the 2012 budget “proposes to do it by a formula based on the number of HIV cases,” which “would hopefully help Florida with several million dollars more every year for prevention.” #
Schmid says that Florida suffers from a major problem with new HIV cases, particularly in South Florida. CDC data shows that in 2008 Miami and Fort Lauderdale were among the nation’s top five metropolitan areas in the number of diagnosed AIDS cases. #
Steve Fallon — the executive director of the Fort Lauderdale-based organization Latinos Salud, which provides information to gay Latino men about diverse issues including HIV and other STDs — writes that HIV prevention is “a smart investment”: #
The President’s proposed budget recognizes that investing slightly more in HIV prevention makes sense, especially since the nation’s HIV prevention budget has been virtually flat since the mid-1990s. Effective HIV prevention counselors and outreach workers help their community clients to prioritize risk reduction and avoid an HIV infection that would otherwise cost each infected person $367,000 in lifetime treatment costs. #
HIV prevention is also a smart investment because non-medical costs make each HIV infection cost society 4.5x more than the costs of treatment alone. People living with HIV may lose workdays due to treatment side effects or to illness; loved ones pay higher family insurance premiums; they may skip promotions, or drop out of the labor pool altogether to serve as caregivers. Prevention can eliminate all of these society burdens at a cost of pennies on the dollar. #
The proposed $58M increase in prevention funding still means a relative decrease in the “buying power” for HIV prevention, relative to the budget in the mid-1990s. However, in these tight budget times, even this incremental increase will add boots on the ground for HIV prevention. #
Housing Works, an HIV advocacy group, points out that, “overall, total US Government-wide spending on HIV/AIDS increases from $26 billion to approximately $28 billion in 2012.” #
