Joe Barton: “In the reauthorization bill that was carefully negotiated on both sides of the aisle and the Senate, we maintained a…”

“In the reauthorization bill that was carefully negotiated on both sides of the aisle and the Senate, we maintained a hold-harmless provision for the formula funding under the bill, but we did not put that hold-harmless provision to the discretionary funding in the bill. Discretionary funds are based on actual active case counts, how many HIV/AIDS patients you have. There is a methodology to determine how many of those individuals there are, and then the discretionary funds are distributed based on need. In the legislation that's pending in the appropriations bill, the hold-harmless provision, which in the authorization bill we had on the formula side, is also applied to the discretionary side. The effect of that would be that an area that at one time had a large number of HIV/ AIDS patients, but those patients had either passed away or been cured or moved out of the area, they wouldn't get to use the old patient count for their discretionary request. They could only count for discretionary purposes the number of active cases that they currently had in their area.”