In America si incazzano sul serio!

In America si incazzano sul serio..
Ancora tagli all' Hiv in Usa, in questo articolo si parla di tagli ai malati di Hiv per darli all'aereoporto in uno stato negli Usa e un gruppo di attivisti Gay si e' ribellato aspramente..
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Groups call Agema HIV cuts plan ‘cruel’
By Todd A. Heywood | 01.25.11 | 8:14 am
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Various organizations representing HIV-positive residents in Michigan as well as groups representing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people statewide and nationally are slamming a plan by a Republican state lawmaker to eliminate funding from a 33 year old health fund and transfer the money to airport funding.

Michigan Messenger originally reported on the proposal last week. During interviews for the story last week, State Rep. Dave Agema (R-Grandville) claimed the money in the Michigan Health Fund Initiative was duplicated in other Michigan Department of Community Health budgets. But an investigation by Messenger reported Monday that the money Agema was targeting made up a significant portion of Michigan’s available resources to draw federal matching money for HIV programming and other public health initiatives.

“Mr. Agema is woefully ill informed and in this case it could cost some Michigander’s their lives. The fund Mr. Agema plans to raid in order to apply to airplane fuel, supports the health of Michigan’s most medically challenged populations,” says Mark Peterson from the Michigan Positive Action Coalition. “This fund pays for critical state services which are not funded in any other manner. Mr. Agema is stealing from those most at need without the slightest idea of how things are funded. Playing games and putting the health of Michigan citizens at risk, is not something the chair of the state House’s Health and Human Services Appropriations subcommittee should be doing. This is not job creation. It is picking on the people at most need and it’s cruel.”

“”It boils down to a simple ethics equation. Should the money be used to literally save lives or should it be used as a tax break?” asked Helen Hicks, chief executive officer of the Michigan AIDS Coalition (MAC). “Perhaps the best way to realign the Representative’s ethics would be to have him sit down with Ryan White’s mother who can share with him the pain her little boy suffered because people were unaware of the facts surrounding HIV and AIDS. She could tell the misinformed Representative that prevention and education are the best ways to keep people healthy. Maybe she could leave him with a photo of her son and the newspaper clippings that captured how ignorance causes nothing but senseless pain and death.”

Some of the federal money comes from the Ryan White CARE Act. The act is named after the Indiana teenager who contracted HIV through contaminated blood products. He was kicked out of school and his home vandalized in the 80s because of his HIV infection. He died in 1990.

And HIV groups are not the only ones calling foul on Agema’s plan.

“The proposal to cut this funding will jeopardize the state’s ability to access critical federal HIV funding,” says Darlene Nipper, deputy executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “These proposed changes are deeply troubling and we urge Rep. Dave Agema, as chair of the state House Appropriations chair Human Services Subcommittee and a member of the Health Subcommittee, to use his authority to sustain vital HIV programs, not cut them. Eliminating these services in the midst of the state’s current public health crisis is unwise, unsound and should be considered unacceptable.”

“Representative Agema’s budget priorities are disconcerting and they invite disastrous results. While Rep. Agema has never attempted to pass as an ally to the LGBTQ community, he doesn’t need to be an advocate for our community to realize that tax breaks to out-of-state airlines cannot conscionably come before saving lives,” said Emily Dievendorf, policy director of the Equality Michigan. “Rep. Agema cannot allow his personal priorities to interfere with his role in providing resources that meet the basic needs of the broader Michigan constituency. Furthermore, Rep. Agema’s attack on the MHFI works in direct opposition to Gov. Snyder’s recent assertion that public health needs to be a bipartisan priority. Snyder specifically cited Michigan’s alarming obesity problem, an epidemic targeted by MHFI funds, as a critical public health threat to our state that needs to be addressed.”

Dievendorf promised the advocacy group would be monitoring budget proposals in the state “vigilantly” to make sure those cuts don’t disproportionately impact the LGBT and HIV-positive communities.