From NAPWA:

The Administration has pledged new money to end the waiting lists, but they will linger for some time. Making sure that everyone who needs ART drugs can get them is an obvious first step towards ending this country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, but when the waiting lists are gone, we’ll have to move on to the hard work of changing attitudes towards people with HIV and ensuring access to health care for all Americans, not just those living with HIV.

It was grimly entertaining, explaining to Conference delegates from Canada and Germany what ADAP is and why we have waiting lists, when it’s so obviously better public health policy and so obviously more fiscally prudent to treat everyone with HIV who wants treatment. After she got past her initial disbelief, a German delegate gently suggested that there are better ways to handle this sort of thing. We wouldn’t need ADAPs, let alone have ADAP waiting lists, if we had a rationally designed national health care system.

Here are the latest numbers from our friends at NASTAD:

Related articles

• ADAP Watch (dgsmith.org)
• Montana ADAP Waiting List: Tuesday: 0, Wednesday: 1 (dgsmith.org)
• Keeping Up with AIDS 2012: Conference continues in the convention center, in the streets and in the spotlight (metroweekly.com)