Last year I posted a brief message describing how, in the late 1980s, my father had founded a group to help AIDS patients in the El Paso, Texas area, and how that group had suffered from financial mismanagement and allegations of fraud after his death.
Apparently this is an endemic problem with federal AIDS funds according to an article published in January in Washington Monthly. The article, by ACT-UP co-founder Wayne Turner, notes that not only were millions of dollars wasted, embezzled and otherwise fraudulently used, but also that many of those who have tried to highlight the fraud “were criticized for drawing attention to the scandal, mostly by employees of other AIDS agencies who feared the scandal could taint their own organizations.”
Some of the waste Turner documents is hardly unprecedented in government-funded programs, but the idea of people in nonprofit AIDS organizations drawing $180,000 salaries and flying to junkets disguised as health conferences while AIDS patients around the country struggle to maintain financial solvency in the face of high health care costs is disgusting.
As Turner sums up his article, “Those who implement the CARE Act now need to place a greater priority on patients’ needs, instead of the money-hungry AIDS industry.”