At the same time Clinton's AIDS advisors have issued a scathing report card which accuses his administration of downgrading AIDS to a lesser priority.

"The administration," says the report, has "failed to exhibit the courage and political will needed to pursue public health strategies that are politically difficult but that have been shown to save lives."

Like HRC and others, the Clinton advisors fault the president for not moving ahead on life-saving needle exchange programs, low-cost items that have been proven to save lives while not, as critics feared, increasing the use of illegal drugs.

In an attempt to thwart critics, the administration's AIDS czaress Sandra Thurman, seized publicly on increased usage fears as an excuse for delays, though both she and the administration are fully aware that long term studies show no such increases.

"I understand people's frustrations," she told reporters, "We're grappling with some really hard stuff."

Among the difficulties faced, no doubt, is the 20+ billion the administration has pledged to rescue South Korea from a financial crisis its own "statesmen" have caused, the same South Korea, in fact, whose borders the administration used last week as an excuse not to sign the international land-mine treaty. (See GayToday's current Environment/ Technology feature).

Thus, large sums of money are not available to save the lives of American citizens.

An AIDS-specific expansion of the Medicaid program would allow states to enroll people who are HIV positive, who would otherwise be excluded from the program until they developed full-blown AIDS. Such an expansion will save resources because the high costs of hospitalization and treating opportunistic infections will be curtailed. Vice President Gore announced his support for such a Medicaid expansion in April and called on the Health Care Financing Administration to issue a report within 30 days on such an initiative.

According to The Washington Post and the Associated Press, the Health Care Financing Administration, which oversees Medicaid, has determined that expanding Medicaid to cover low-income people who are HIV-infected but who are not yet diagnosed with AIDS is too expensive.

"[S]everal proposals were tested and all were too expensive, Victor Zonana, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said Thursday," according to the Associated Press.

"For administration officials to acknowledge that new treatments administered early in the course of HIV disease save lives, and then fail to develop programs to make those treatments available is a moral outrage," said Winnie Stachelberg, political director of the Human Rights Campaign.

The administration's own guidelines for the treatment of HIV disease, released in June, clearly indicate that early treatment is essential. For the administration not to develop a comprehensive plan to ensure that these treatments are available to all those who need them is a life-threatening contradiction.

Stachelberg pledged that the Human Rights Campaign, working with its coalition partners, will continue to press the Clinton administration to rapidly develop a solution to this problem. "People's lives are at stake," Stachelberg said. "`Too expensive' is an unacceptable excuse for not making these treatments available to people who cannot otherwise afford them."