America Living With AIDS

E R I C A Living

12. Congress should remove the government restrictions that have been imposed on
the use of funds for certain kinds of HIV education, services, and research.
13. The Secretary of Health and Human Services should direct the National Institutes of Health, the Health Care Financing Administration, and the Health
Resources and Services Administration to work together to develop a series of
recommendations to address the obstacles that keep many people from participating in HIV-related clinical trials, as well as the variables that force some people to seek participation in trials because they have no other health care options.
14. HIV-related services should be expanded to facilities where underserved populations receive health care and human services, in part to ensure their increased
participation in trials of investigational new therapies.
15. Current efforts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to expand the recruitment of underrepresented populations in the AIDS Clinical Trials Group should
be continued and increased.
16. HIV education and training programs for health care providers should be
improved and expanded and better methods should be developed to disseminate
state-of-the-art clinical information about HIV disease, as well as drug and alcohol use, to the full range of health care providers.
17. Greater priority and funding should be given to behavioral, social science, and
health services research.
18. The Food and Drug Administration should aggressively pursue all options for
permitting the early use of promising new therapies for conditions for which
there is no standard therapy or for patients who have failed or are intolerant of
standard therapy.
19. The National Institutes of Health should develop a formal mechanism for disseminating state-of-the-art treatment information in an expeditious and farreaching manner.
20. The Department of Health and Human Services should conduct a study to determine the policies of third-party payers regarding the payments of certain health
service costs that are provided as part of an individual's participation in clinical
trials conducted in the development of HIV-related drugs.
21. Implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act should be carefully monitored, and states and localities should evaluate the adequacy of existing state and
local antidiscrimination laws and ordinances for people with disabilities, including people living with HIV disease.