Tom Coburn: “we have just spent 15 minutes talking about a tug of war over money, and what we should be talking about is prevention…”

“we have just spent 15 minutes talking about a tug of war over money, and what we should be talking about is prevention and the great things this bill does to keep the next person from getting HIV infected. When I came to Congress in 1995, one of my goals was to try to raise the level of awareness of how we can prevent this disease. This is not hard. But we have let extraneous issues get before us. There is no one on that side that I doubt their compassion for wanting to do the same thing I want to do, and that is to not ever see another person get this disease. The gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) and the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Eshoo) feel as strongly about that as I do, and I know the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman) does. The gentleman from California has been a prince to work with. It has been one of the real pleasures of my time in Congress to have worked on this bill with him, and I will remember it and I thank him for his cooperation. But we cannot forget about what this epidemic is about. There should not be 40,000 new infections this year for this disease. Now, think about it. For every one person who gets this disease, it is a minimum of $10,000 in health care. If we prevent 1,000 from getting it, we save $10 million in health care that year, the next year, and every year. If we drop the infection rate in half in this country, we will save $5 billion in 3 years, just by dropping the infection rate.”