Advocates Ask Legislature for $250,000 for AIDS Drugs

Sep 23, 2008 by Elizabeth Ziegler

(KCPW News) The state's AIDS Drug Assistance Program is so impacted by a 35 percent increase in requests for help that the Utah Department of Health has started a waiting list for the expensive life-saving drugs. Toni Johnson of the People with AIDS Coalition of Utah wants the legislature to expand the program with a one-time appropriation of $250,000.

"Sixty-eight percent of ADAP clients earn or have incomes less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. And so they can't afford to buy their own health insurance. And if they have a job that has health insurance, they are uninsurable. So this program is so necessary and so important," Johnson says.

The drugs slow the progression of HIV to full-blown AIDS, a terminal and expensive disease to treat. The drugs not only save lives, Johnson says it saves the state money. She's done the math, and believes distributing the drugs through the program is cheaper than having Medicaid pay for them.

"If you fund this program, it's going to cost the state $358 per person, where if they go onto Medicaid, because they've progressed to AIDS because this program is not open, then it costs upwards of $12,000 per year that the state has to pay for Medicaid costs," Johnson says. "So there's a big, huge no-brainer there."

She says Utah is one of the only states in the nation that does not allocate ongoing funding for its AIDS Drug Assistance Program. However, the program did receive one-time state funding in 2006 and 2007.

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