Massachusetts: Funding for AIDS Services Dwindling

The state's evolving budget crisis has forced the Massachusetts HIV/AIDS Bureau to drastically cut programs since the beginning of the year. The cuts include reductions in food services, substance-abuse treatment, and social services to help HIV-infected individuals navigate the labyrinth of patient services. Services in prevention and support for HIV-positive jail inmates have also been cut, in what officials call a serious blow to containing the spread of the disease.

"We have really decimated programs," said Jean Flatley McGuire, director of the state HIV/AIDS Bureau. "And all of the signals we get are of very grave concerns of what is going to be available in the coming budget year." For now, the budget stands at $41.4 million -- a 20 percent reduction from last year and more than $2 million less than what the state spent as far back as 1997. In that time, demand for services has soared 30 percent.

The impact of the cuts has fallen more heavily upon the state's black and Hispanic communities and has collided with the state's diminished economic resources. Seventeen initiatives designed to help women at risk for HIV have been cut.

At a conference Wednesday called "HIV/AIDS: Hard Times, Hard Choices," hundreds of physicians, social workers, and activists involved in AIDS were given a battle plan. John McDonough, a former legislator who is now a Brandeis professor, urged them to appeal to lawmakers but also to look beyond pleas for their own programs. Only a united appeal will work, he added.

In the 1980s, said Larry Kessler, founding director of AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, AIDS was a "front-burner disease. We've been bumped to the back burner and since this September, we're behind the stove, and that's a horrible place to be when you're fighting a public health menace."

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