MAP Advocate
AIDS Advocacy Update
Vol. 8 No. 3
February 26, 2002
In this issue:
Advocates from around Minnesota came to the State Capitol on Thursday, February 28 to talk to legislators about the importance of comprehensive sexual health education. The day included scheduled meetings between legislators and residents from their districts, and a press conference at 9:30 a.m. in the Great Hall.
If you couldn't make it to the State Capitol for AIDS Action Day take 10 minutes right now to call your representative and senator and tell them to support comprehensive sexual health education and oppose efforts to impose an abstinence-only-until-marriage curriculum.
Don't know who your legislators are? Go to www.leg.state.mn.us or call them at 651-296-2146 or toll-free at 800-657-3550.
Want to know more? Visit us at www.mnaidsproject.org
It starts with a private exchange between doctor and patient --information that's protected by the state's medical data practices law. Then the information finds its way into the workplace, whether through the insurance claims process or because an employee is telling his boss about his health. This is when the data privacy protections for health information start to fall apart. Existing protections such as the ADA have gaps.
MAP's medical data privacy bill (SF3074/HF3601) aims to ensure that medical data privacy protections extend into the workplace. So far, the bill has been approved by three Senate committees and is currently awaiting action on the Senate floor. The House companion is cued to run the committee gauntlet this week.
Watch out for Citizens Against Government Waste. This "nonprofit" but hardly "nonpartisan" conservative group just released its nonobjective report about waste in HIV funding. The report's primary targets are any programs specifically designed to serve gay and bisexual men, including Map's PrideAlive program. It also calls programs such as HOPWA (Housing Opportunities for People With AIDS) duplicative and wasteful. The report questions the amount of money being spent to fight HIV and calls for much of it to be eliminated or redirected to other programs.
Add this to the Bush administration's appointments of conservatives to posts responsible for national AIDS policy and the administration's push to beef-up abstinence-only education, and it starts to look like Washington wants to go back to responding to HIV through politics rather than public health.
On February 22, the commissioner's STD/HIV Prevention Task Force passed a resolution supporting comprehensive sexual health education as an effective and proven way to reduce the spread of HIV and other STIs. The group also endorsed a call for prevention services targeting gay and bisexual men.
The resolutions were in response to state and national efforts to impose abstinence-only-until-marriage sexual health curriculum and limit HIV health services for gay and bisexual men. The resolutions called upon Minnesota's commissioner of health to take similar stands.
The Minnesota Department of Health's emergency health powers bill is still moving through the Legislature, though without many of the provisions of greatest concern to civil liberties advocates. MDH is promising to come back with a new bill next year after working through details with community interest groups. Perhaps this time the HIV community will have a place at the table.
With the announcement of an even larger budget deficit, HIV programs remain vulnerable to the budget ax. Stay tuned for more on what you can do to protect funding for HIV prevention and services.
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Friday, March 30, 2007
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