30/03/2026
About 510,000 people died of AIDS in the U.S. between 1981 and 1996. In the late 1990s, a breakthrough “cocktail” of HIV meds became available. Since then, treatment options have become more abundant and easier to take, and in the United States, HIV-related mortality rates have plunged. But now there’s risk of a backslide. States across the country are considering cuts to a program that covers about a quarter of the roughly 1.2 million people in the U.S. living with HIV. Tens of thousands could soon lose access to medication.
The most extreme example is in Florida. Early this month, the state government drastically reduced access to its AIDS Drug Assistance Program, a long-standing federal initiative operated and partly funded by states that provides free or subsidized HIV meds and care. Claiming a $120 million budget shortfall, Florida chopped the annual income-eligibility cutoff for ADAP from about $64,000 (in line with many other states) to about $21,000. Half of the 32,000 Floridians who depend on ADAP would lose coverage.
ADAP programs work both to help save lives and to stop the epidemic’s spread: Medically suppressed HIV cannot be transmitted. A recent study calculated that if Congress were to eliminate the act that houses ADAP, new HIV infections across 31 major U.S. cities would rise nearly 50 percent by 2030.
Tim Murphy reports on how cuts in ADAP “could see the first rise in HIV incidence in decades”: https://nymag.visitlink.me/8pBteM
