WASHINGTON — The leaders of the Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus are demanding answers from the White House after a mass exodus from a presidential advisory group.
Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the co-chairs of that group, delivered a letter last week to President Trump that called for the White House to back off proposed budget cuts to HIV/AIDS programs, revamp the currently blank website it scrubbed in January, and to appoint a national AIDS policy director, all after six council members jointly resigned. Those members slammed Trump for not caring about the issue in a public letter of resignation earlier this month.
A seventh member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) — Dr. Jeffrey Akman, the dean at George Washington University’s school of medicine and health sciences — also resigned recently, according to a spokesman from the Department of Health and Human Services.
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This is the last straw! Politicians need to act morally and responsibly to improve the quality of life with better, more extensive healthcare coverage for all its citizens. I also believe that the politicians who work for us, who are paid with our tax dollars to represent us and our interests in Congress and are our employees, should not have better healthcare benefits than we do. In what paradigm does an employee have better healthcare coverage than an employer? Perhaps an incentive for good healthcare benefits for us, would be to include them in our healthcare coverage. How much better would our healthcare package look then. Furthermore, Congress wants to give tax breaks to the wealthy. That’s crazy. They don’t need it; we do! Government needs to work to meet the needs of all its citizens. If it doesn’t, it fails and we as a country fail. We have the power to influence change. Rally for political changes, vote, get others to vote, and vote these self-serving ignominious egoists out of office. Continue to stay involved and be vigilant so our Democratic Congresswo/men and Senators do what they say they plan to do for us, and not what is in their own best interests.