Bill Clinton: “Thank you. I want to ask one brief question, if I might. One of the difficulties that we have in dealing responsibly…”

“Thank you. I want to ask one brief question, if I might. One of the difficulties that we have in dealing responsibly with this issue involves the dilemma that you just laid out when you said we ought to have voluntary testing, not mandatory testing. And the issue is most clearly represented with the whole question of pregnant women now given the advances that have been shown. I've studied the CDC guidelines; I think they're--they make sense to me. I think the rest of us who don't know the facts ought to follow people that we hire to make these judgments. You know, if there's--it makes a lot of sense to me. But you just said that there were 34,000 people that needed your services, and only 10,000 were getting them and we had to find a way to get more people to get voluntarily tested. So how do we close the gap between 10 and 34? What can we do? What can you do? What can the rest of us do? That's what's driving this whole mandatory testing thing. It's not the notion that people are out there hiding, trying to avoid getting tested; it's that there's this huge gap and that society is being burdened by it and so are these people. So how do we close that gap? Dr. Sherer. I know other speakers today will address this, but let me start. Mandatory testing not only will not address this problem, it will further drive people away and be a disincentive to their coming into care.”