Bush Creates Legacy Battling HIV-AIDS

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Does anyone think this initiative will survive into the next administration?  It's hard for me to imagine that it won't:
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In Global Battle on AIDS, Bush Creates Legacy

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: January 5, 2008

WASHINGTON — Dr. Jean W. Pape did not know what to expect in early January 2003, when he slipped away from his work treating AIDS patients in Haiti and flew to Washington for a secret meeting with President Bush.

Mr. Bush was considering devoting billions to combat global AIDS, a public health initiative unparalleled in size and scope. The deliberations had been tightly carried out; even the health secretary was left out early on. If President Bush was going to shock the world — and skeptical Republicans — with a huge expenditure of American cash to send expensive drugs overseas, he wanted it to be well spent.

“He said, ‘I will hold you accountable, because this is a big move, this is an important thing that I’ve been thinking about for a long time,’” recalled Dr. Pape, one of several international AIDS experts Mr. Bush consulted. “We indicated to him that our arms are totally broken as physicians, knowing that there are things we could do if we had the drugs.”

Nearly five years later, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — Pepfar, for short — may be the most lasting bipartisan accomplishment of the Bush presidency.

With a year left in office, Mr. Bush confronts an America bitterly split over the war in Iraq. His domestic achievements, the tax cuts and education reform, are not fully embraced by Democrats, and his second-term legislative agenda — revamping Social Security and immigration policy — lies in ruins.

The global AIDS program is a rare exception. So far, roughly 1.4 million AIDS patients have received lifesaving medicine paid for with American dollars, up from 50,000 before the initiative. Even Mr. Bush’s most ardent foes, among them Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, his 2004 Democratic challenger, find it difficult to argue with the numbers.

“It’s a good thing that he wanted to spend the money,” said Mr. Kerry, an early proponent of legislation similar to the plan Mr. Bush adopted. “I think it represents a tremendous accomplishment for the country.”

Announced in the 2003 State of the Union address, the plan called for $15 billion for AIDS prevention, treatment and care, concentrating on 15 hard-hit nations in Africa and the Caribbean. An enthusiastic Congress has already approved $19 billion.

Mr. Bush is pressing for a new five-year commitment of $30 billion. He will travel to Africa in February to make his case — and, the White House hopes, burnish the compassionate conservative side of his legacy.

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An update:

House Approves Global AIDS Program
   
By JIM ABRAMS
The Associated Press
Wednesday, April 2, 2008; 4:22 PM

WASHINGTON -- The House voted Wednesday to triple to more than $10 billion a year U.S. humanitarian spending on fighting AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in Africa and other stricken areas of the world.

About $41 billion of the $50 billion over five years would be devoted to AIDS, significantly expanding a program credited with saving more than 1 million lives in Africa alone in the largest U.S. investment ever against a single disease.

Every day another 6,000 people are infected with the HIV virus, said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman, D-Calif. "We have a moral imperative to act and to act decisively," he said.

The House voted 308-116 to extend and broaden the scope of the $15 billion President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that President Bush promoted and Congress enacted in 2003. It has been hailed as a noteworthy foreign policy success of the Bush presidency.

The White House, which backs the House bill, said the program is supporting anti-retroviral treatment for about 1.45 million people and is on track to meet its goals of backing treatment for 2 million, preventing 7 million new infections and providing care for 10 million, including orphans and vulnerable children.

In 2007, 33 million people worldwide were living with HIV and AIDS, according to the United Nations.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, added that while the program is based on altruism, it has strengthened U.S. security.

Without addressing the AIDS pandemic, she said, it "will continue to spread its mix of death, poverty and despondency that is further destabilizing governments and societies, and undermining the security of entire regions."

The compromise bill was one of the last endeavors of the former Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Tom Lantos, D-Calif., who died of cancer in February. The measure is named after Lantos and his predecessor as Foreign Affairs chairman, the late Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., who worked together on the 2003 act.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has approved a similar $50 billion bill, and the legislation is seen as having a good chance of passing in an election year in which few major bills will reach the president's desk.