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Black business group blasts Clinton’s AIDS stance |
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By Jeffrey Young
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Posted: 07/13/07 03:17 PM [ET] |
A group of black business owners strongly criticized Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) Friday for her position on funding for federal HIV/AIDS programs.
In a statement issued Friday and a letter sent to Clinton’s presidential campaign — and copied to Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) campaign — National Black Chamber of Commerce President and Chief Executive Harry Alford accused Clinton of “pandering” to African Americans during the presidential debate at Howard University in Washington last month.
During the event at the historically black university, Clinton called for stronger measures to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS in the black community and vowed to boost funding for programs that provide care to low-income patients under the Ryan White CARE Act.
“I'm working to raise the budget for Ryan White, which the Bush administration has kept flat, disgracefully so, because there are a lot of women particularly who are becoming infected in poor rural areas as well as under-served urban areas in states where, frankly, their state governments won’t give them medical care,” Clinton said.
Clinton’s statements are at odds with her Senate record, Alford wrote.
“I found it interesting that you chose a presidential debate, held before a largely African-American audience to speak out on the fact that HIV/AIDS funding does not fairly reach African Americans with HIV. I only wish you had voted the same way last year in the United States Senate, when we really needed you,” Alford wrote.
Clinton was one of a handful of senators who fought to protect Ryan White dollars for their home states that would have been redirected to Southern states and rural areas.
The Ryan White programs, enacted in 1990, set aside extra funding for major cities that had large populations of HIV/AIDS patients at the time, such as New York and San Francisco.
In the intervening years, the rates of HIV/AIDS infections have sharply risen in Southern states and rural areas, particularly among blacks.
According to a Henry J. Kaiser Foundation report issued this month, about 500,000 of the estimated 1.2 million Americans infected with HIV/AIDS are black, even though the community represents just 12 percent of the U.S. population.
After striking a deal with Clinton and her allies, Congress passed a Ryan White bill to increase funding for Southern and rural areas but capped how much of the dollars would come from New York and other large states. Clinton voted for the final bill, which President Bush signed in December.
A call for comment from Clinton’s campaign was not immediately returned.
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