Thousands at Risk as Waiting Lists Grow for HIV Medications

Management failures by a state agency have put thousands of Floridians at risk and required those sick with HIV and AIDS to depend on charity from pharmaceutical companies to get life-saving medication.

Federal auditors earlier this year said Florida's AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) failed to see a coming spike in destitute patients unable to pay the thousands of dollars a month required to treat their disease. That rapid increase in clients for ADAP services happened and state coffers went dry.

Dr. Ed Holifield, a Tallahassee physician and community activist on behalf of health care for the poor, said it's a travesty.

"We are living in 2011. We call ourselves a civil-rights society," Holifield said. "This is not the way to treat people, no matter what their station is in life."

For thousands of Floridians, the mismanagement could be the difference between life and death.

Only an emergency infusion of more federal money and, in the Tallahassee area, the contributions of nonprofits and pharmaceutical companies, are providing those with HIV or AIDS access to the expensive medication they'd otherwise be unable to afford.

Now, more than 4,000 low-income Floridians living with HIV or AIDS are on a growing waiting list for essential medication, the biggest such list in the country.

In Leon County, 31 residents are on the outside looking in, depending on charity health care for life-saving medication.

Karl Warren, a Tallahassee man on ADAP's waiting list since August, gets eight medications from Big Bend Cares, a Tallahassee-based agency, on a month-to-month basis. On his own, he said he could never pay $7,000 a month for his meds.

"I couldn't even be homeless and do this," said Warren, 45. "I could give up everything, including food, and I still wouldn't be able to afford this. There's just no way."

Warren was diagnosed in 1995. "ADAP for me is literally the difference between life and death," he said.

State officials say a wounded economy and a rise in unemployment overloaded the state's ADAP program. But the U.S. Health Resources Services Administration says the Florida Health Department's inability to manage federal money created the state's deficit that reached $32 million in April 2010. A Health Resources Services report said the state department "failed to utilize trend data, project program growth and expenditures and take quick action."

The Friends of AIDS Foundation is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for HIV positive individuals and empowering people to make healthy choices to prevent the spread of the HIV virus. To learn more about The Friends of AIDS Foundation, please visit: http://www.friendsofaids.org.

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