Richard Burr: “this is, plain and simple, about whether this Senate is going to allow legislation to go forward to reauthorize Ryan…”

“this is, plain and simple, about whether this Senate is going to allow legislation to go forward to reauthorize Ryan White, that allows the funding to follow the patients. What an incredible thought, that we would be here at a stalemate over whether health dollars follow the individual HIV-positive and AIDS patients. In North Carolina, we have gone on an aggressive program for volunteer testing. The amazing thing we found out is that of those individuals now tested, 30 percent have full-blown aids, meaning that the options we have, that the health community has, are minimal from a standpoint of how we stop that disease in its tracks and give them any quality of life. We are making the steps in North Carolina to try to identify the individuals who should be on a regimen of drugs. But by not allowing this bill to come to the floor for debate, we are denying the Senate the ability to bring the bill up and to consider the merits of it, and, yes, to amend it if we want to, to live with the majority of this body as to whether we change the funding formulas from what the committee has decided; which is, the funding should follow the patient. My colleague from Oklahoma is an OB/GYN by profession. He has the medical degree. He understands the specifics of it. And the one thing that Tom Coburn has drilled in me over and over and over again is that to deny these individuals the ability to have the regimen of drugs that are available is to give them a death sentence.”