Bailing out ourselves

On the same day we hear that we and our descendants have taken on the challenge of bailing out yet another failed private business endeavor in the federal handout to insurance giant AIG, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has mentioned an emerging need for money for the public sector.

They point out that the emergence of evidence that 40 percent more people than we realized are being infected with HIV each year means we should spend more money than we have to reduce the number of people catching the virus that leads to AIDS.

We thought only 40,000 people each year were getting the virus that would put them on a lifelong need for medication, in addition to a likely need for help with housing at some point, and social services to navigate all of that. In other words, apparently, we thought we had it under control. Unless it was your brother, your daugher, your mother, your son, who had been dealt a permanently damaged immune system though a preventable disease we as a society could have done more to avert. Oh well.

I realize it is easy to criticize those who run things, particularly in the last eight years, during which more than ever, the message of “don’t catch AIDS, and if you do, you did something wrong,” seems to have failed. Until recently, I worked with, and was among a group of people who criticized the management all day long, with may play into why we no longer are there. So I would be the first to say that second guessing the methods of the past is not a constructive path.

Let’s look instead at the hope for the future.

While the bailout of AIG was, apparently, a no-brainer (literally, as a question on it was the only one Successor to Sepatuagenarian Presidential Wannabe McCain Sarah Palin has answered — with the philosophical take that it’s a bad, bad, necessary thing), less straightforward acknowledgment is likely in the question of putting up money to fight the epidemic at home.

The CDC is calling for $4.8 billion over the next five years to reduce the transmission rate by 50 percent over the next 12 years. Leaving aside imagining if one of those spared is yourself, your sister, your grandson, your next great scientist, health officials agree that each new person who gets the virus represents a cost of more than $1 million in treatment and lost productivity, isn’t it time, at long last, to bail ourselves out?