Obama's global health plan disappoints activists

IPSnews.net ran a story today that Obama's plans to spend 63 billion dollars over the next six years overseas may not live up to the president's campaign promises. Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, says the FY10 budget "ignores the president's campaign promises to fully fund PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and to provide a fair-share contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria."

Here are further quotes from the article from various agencies. For the full piece, Click here

"This proposal is even worse than we had feared," said Christine Lubinski, director of the Centre for Global Health Policy. "With this spending request, Obama has broken his campaign promise to provide 1 billion dollars a year in new money for global AIDS, and he has overlooked the growing threat of tuberculosis."

"Until we see the full budget with the line item detail on U.S. bilateral AIDS programmes and on the Global Fund, we will not know just how far off the mark the budget information presented today really is," said Zeitz of the Global AIDS Alliance. "In fact, the early release of less than completely detailed budget information on the president's global health strategy makes it difficult to know what the real dollars are and how the White House intends on spending them."

Kaytee Riek of Health Global Access Project (HealthGAP) said that the U.S. was only currently meeting about one third of its expected contribution to the Global Fund - roughly 900 million dollars of contributions - and 1.8 billion dollars would constitute a fair U.S. contribution. "The Fund is facing a financial crisis," said Riek. "So when there's only a 366-million-dollar increase for (funding to combat) AIDS, malaria, and TB, how will you meet the needs of the Global Fund and expand PEPFAR, all of which Obama promised to do as a candidate" – a claim Riek said Obama had already reiterated as president. "This is not something we can fall behind on because it's going to come back and haunt us in the future," she said.