Slate | June 21, 2017
Jeffrey Crowley, who served from 2009-2011 as the Director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy and Senior Advisor on Disability Policy for President Barack Obama, says that one of the biggest contributors to the nation’s overall progress in responding to the HIV epidemic has been the expanded access to coverage under the ACA, mostly through new Medicaid coverage. This is helping to get more people into care, on treatment and virally suppressed. People whose viral loads reach “undetectable” levels through proper treatment have been shown to be non-infectious to others.
“Unfortunately, repealing the ACA would pull the rug out from under the national response to HIV and would create an inflection back toward rising infections,” said Crowley, now Program Director, Infectious Disease Initiatives at Georgetown University Law Center’s O’Neill Institute. “At a time when we are experiencing success in responding to HIV and when we urgently need to respond to the growing opioid crisis, enacting the [GOP’s] American Health Care Act or any similar repeal law would be devastating to the health system upon which all Americans depend.”