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CLINTON'S KILLER AIDS POLICY

What's the top public health enemy in the country right now? The
answer, of course, is AIDS.

AIDS is the top killer of men in the age range of 25 to 44. And
it is the fourth leading killer of women in the same age group,
generally considered to be the prime of life for both sexes.
These figures were just released by the Centers for Disease
Control.

Each year since reporting began in 1981, AIDS has spread wider
and wider until it has now emerged as a major killer throughout
the population. The whole situation is an outrage. It's known
what this disease is and how it can be prevented. AIDS is a
killer that can be stopped. Yet the U.S. government's response
has been limited. More money was spent on developing nuclear
weapons of destruction than has been spent on saving the lives of
people with AIDS.

Of course, part of the reason AIDS doesn't rank up there with the
Pentagon when it comes to big government dollars is purely
reactionary. The first concentrations of AIDS were discovered in
the gay, Black and Latino communities.

But all that reactionary prejudice was supposed to end when the
Bush-Reagan-Quayle gang were thrown out of the White House. In
fact, many in the movement to demand an all-out war to fight AIDS
gave their support to Bill Clinton in the election precisely
because he promised he would put in a new policy. They played a
key role in Clinton's win last November.

So has anything changed? Clinton has yet to define any real AIDS
policy. It's a subject he's basically ignored altogether. In
fact, the Clinton health plan--which should be a clarion call to
battle AIDS--
doesn't contain any statement on how AIDS will be fought. AIDS is
mentioned only three times in the version Clinton presented to
Congress, and that's only in lists of various health problems. It
treats AIDS almost like it's acne or some other chronic nuisance.

It's past time for the Clinton administration to take action on
AIDS. A health plan that doesn't answer the AIDS crisis is no
health plan at all. It has to be put on the top of Congress's
health-care agenda. For AIDS is part of the crisis that's forcing
Congress to take up some sort of health-care plan decades after
every other industrial country in the world has done so.

                               -30-

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted
if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World,
55 West 17 St., New York, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@blythe.org.)

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