[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5868-5869]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          ELIMINATING HIV/AIDS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from New 
York (Mr. Rangel) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. RANGEL. I thank you for the opportunity to greet a group of 
ministers that have come to the Nation's capital in order to support 
the resources to eliminate HIV and AIDS virus infections.
  It is strange how God has made us forget the blessings that we have 
with good health until, of course, that health is endangered, and then 
we recognize that what we have depended on may be threatened or may be 
gone or may not even exist for the 40,000 people that don't enjoy 
health insurance.
  But because this disease has such a stigma and because a million 
Americans suffer from it, and 500,000 Americans have died from it, it 
has been a very costly situation in terms of providing the medication 
to stop the disease and to prevent death. And death is certain without 
treatment.
  These ministers have formed, some 20 years ago, in a group that was 
headed by Deborah House--and today it is directed by C. Virginia 
Fields, and Pastor Calvin Butts from the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a 
landmark in Harlem, New York City, and the country--have brought 
together ministers from all over the country as well as the National 
Medical Association and other outstanding people to make people aware 
of the fact that this disease is not only caused by the infection of 
the virus, but it's caused by reckless sex, unprotected sex, actions of 
men that are in prison, actions that when they come home they transmit 
through sexual activities to their wives.

                              {time}  1050

  So to a large extent, it is the ignorance of people that has caused 
this disease to explode and to spread beyond the communities where it 
was initiated.
  It has cost a lot of money in order to make certain that we control 
the spread of this disease, but it doesn't really take that much money 
to be active in making certain that people are educated about the 
threat of those diseases.
  And that is why they come to Washington today, when there is a belief 
that Medicaid that provides health care for the very, very poor--that 
it is not in jeopardy by people who want to transfer a Federal, a 
national, responsibility to the States, as we find proposals coming up 
this week.
  That is why Medicare, which is a national program, is being 
threatened by the idea that people can get a voucher and go out and get 
insurance from an insurance company. Imagine going to an insurance 
company, being infected with AIDS, a terminal disease, and seeing what 
costs the private insurance company would ask you for without Federal 
assistance.
  So it seems to me that all people--black, white, Catholic, and 
Protestant--could come together in terms of answering the question, How 
do you treat the lesser among us? How do you treat the poor in our 
community? And isn't it a fact that if we reach out a hand and provide 
the medicine and the support for those people who are infected with HIV 
and with AIDS, in the longer sense what we are doing is allowing 
Americans to be more productive, healthy, having healthy families and 
healthy children so that they will be able to get an education, a 
decent job, and provide America with the type of talent that is so 
important if we are going to meet the obligations of this new age where 
technology is going to be so important if we're going to be 
competitive.

[[Page 5869]]

  So now is the time, where these ministers have come to our Nation's 
Capital, perhaps to reach out to people of all faiths--whether they 
come from the mosques, whether they come from the synagogues, whether 
they come from our churches--to go back to the Biblical writings as we 
look at what we are faced with today. And that is, how does a great 
nation, as the United States of America--how do we treat our powerless? 
How do we treat our poor? What opportunities do we have for people who 
are poor to leave poverty and move to the middle class?
  The answer to those questions, Mr. Speaker, is in our hands, and I do 
hope that we vote and do the right thing.

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