At-home HIV tests can still save thousands of lives, and taxpayer funds

The biggest political sex scandal doesn’t involve Roy Moore. It involves our government aiding and abetting HIV transmission, killing more Americans than died in battle in all wars since the Revolutionary War.

President Trump has called Washington a swamp, whose moral, fiscal, and ethical corruption has contaminated our nation. There’s no greater example than government’s failure to eliminate AIDS. With another World AIDS Day behind us, infections have remained stubbornly steady at roughly 40,000 new cases a year for decades.

In addition to the human toll, that means we’re accruing about $20 billion in future HIV treatment costs annually. The $34 billion AIDS budget accounts for over 1 percent of all federal tax receipts. This week, we’ve heard many Democrats talk in frightening terms about the potential $1 trillion impact over the next ten years of the tax reform package. Yet, we’re on the path of spending almost $500 million on AIDS over the next 10 years unless we do something now. Where’s the outrage over failed HIV prevention?

Testing virtually eliminated HIV transfusion transmission. The testing of pregnant women for HIV dramatically reduced mother-to-unborn-child transmission. Yet we have failed to make testing widely accessible so that people can test themselves and partners before having sex — the most common way HIV is transmitted.

Blame the Swamp. For decades, government promoted a politically palatable HIV prevention message: Abstinence, being faithful, and, for those living dangerously, condoms as “safe sex.” The government aggressively promoted condoms, aware of their limitations both in terms of people’s willingness to use them and their known high failure rate for protecting even from pregnancy (only 2 percent if used perfectly, but 18 percent under real-world conditions). At the same time, government went out of its way to limit the one thing that would definitely stop the spread of HIV: testing.