Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I am pleased to be joining my colleague, Senator Collins, in introducing a bill to update the funding formula for the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS, or HOPWA, program.

HOPWA is a program within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, that provides state and local governments with resources to ensure that stable housing and supportive services are available for low-income individuals living with HIV/AIDS and their families.

Stable and affordable housing is a critical component of treatment for HIV-positive individuals. More than half of this population will face homelessness or an unstable housing situation at some point during the course of their illness. Medication for treatment is extremely expensive, and the assistance offered by HOPWA results in better management of this illness, reduces the risk of HIV transmission, and ensures that better public health outcomes can be achieved.

Our bipartisan legislation seeks to strengthen HOPWA by improving the accuracy of the formula used to distribute funding to housing programs that benefit people living with HIV/AIDS. This improved funding formula would take into account the number of persons currently living in a community with HIV/AIDS.

HOPWA's current funding formula instead considers the cumulative number of individuals diagnosed with HIV in a community since 1981, and includes those individuals who have since passed away. In fact, according to HUD, 55 percent of the cases used to determine funding allocations under the current formula are deceased individuals. As a result, this diverts already limited funding from communities that are dealing with the effects of this epidemic most acutely today

Our bill proposes a more accurate formula that will protect low- income individuals living with HIV/AIDS and their families and will better target federal resources to the states and localities with the greatest need today. In short, we hope to make the program more effective and responsive in addressing the current needs of communities.

Furthermore, to ease the move to a fairer allocation of resources, the bill transitions current grantees to the new formula over a 5-year period. Grantees will not lose more than 5 percent of their share of HOPWA formula funds in each successive year until fiscal year 2021 and cannot gain more than 10 percent of their share in each successive fiscal year.

I thank Senator Collins for her partnership, and I urge my colleagues to support this bipartisan bill, which will enable communities to provide care to those living with HIV/AIDS by ensuring that their current housing challenges can be addressed. ______

By Mr. CORNYN (for himself and Mr. Carper):

S. 2669. A bill to amend titles XIX and XXI of the Social Security Act to require States to provide to the Secretary of Health and Human Services certain information with respect to provider terminations, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Finance.

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