Proposed Ryan
White changes could cut San Francisco's share by $9 million

Changes proposed by the Bush administration to the way federal Ryan White CARE Act funds are distributed could cost San Francisco $9 million over the next five years, reports the Bay Area Reporter. Administration officials announced that they will urge Congress to change the Ryan White funding formulas away from the current method of using a region's cumulative number of AIDS cases to allocate funds to instead looking at which areas have rising HIV infection rates and unmet treatment needs. But that would cost San Francisco, which was one of the first U.S. cities to report AIDS cases, up to $9 million in federal funding and the state of California as much as $20 million, AIDS advocates say. Local officials say they plan to lobby Congress to limit the extent of the funding cuts to areas with long-established AIDS epidemics, including San Francisco. "There is plenty of room for negotiation," Ernest Hopkins, director of federal affairs for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, told the Bay Area Reporter.