Former President Bill Clinton envisions the day when there is a cure for HIV/AIDS—hopefully in his lifetime, he said. But first, Clinton predicted on Nov. 11, during a speech at the Palmer House Hilton, 17 E. Monroe, there will be a vaccine.
Clinton spoke to about 1,000 guests at the inaugural Chicago House Speaker Series, sponsored by Harris Bank. The two-hour event, which included a 45-minute speech from Clinton, followed by a 20-minute question-and-answer session of pre-screened questions, hosted by Yasmin Bates-Brown of Harris Bankcorp, Inc., raised about $400,000. Chicago House helps more than 1,100 Chicago-area residents with HIV/AIDS and their family members find housing, medical care, and emotional, spiritual support.
"I hope I live [ long enough that doctors and scientists can ] find a cure," Clinton said.
The wide-ranging speech addressed HIV/AIDS, homelessness, health care, current events and more—even the TV show Mad Men. Clinton told touching personal tales and brought the crowd to laughs on multiple occasions.
He opened the address noting that the Palmer House Hilton was where he celebrated winning the Democratic nomination for presidency in 1992; then, he saluted Veteran's Day. From there, he moved into a commentary about the tragic events at Fort Hood.
"Think about what sparked the tragedy at Fort Hood," he said. "Some of the most moving things I have read since the Fort Hood tragedy have been the comments of our Muslim veterans who were horrified by what happened and feel no one will ever trust them again."
Several LGBT notables were in attendance, including Mark Ishaug, president of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, and Art Johnston, owner of Sidetrack and Equality Illinois board member, among others.
Clinton noted that Chicago has the sixth-largest HIV/AIDS problem in the country. "But you're doing your job because you're not the sixth largest city," he said, highlighting the work of Chicago House.
Clinton said homeless HIV/AIDS patients are in dire need of healthcare reform.
"There's still an increasing number of homeless people with HIV/AIDS, and a lot of that is because of the health care crisis," he said.
The homeless are three to nine times more likely to have HIV/AIDS than people with stable housing, according to a 2004 study by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Clinton, in his speech, attributed this fact to the high cost of medications and treatments, and said public healthcare could curb homelessness for those with the virus.
He added that healthcare reform is not only morally right, but, because reform will encourage preventive care, it will save money in the long run.
"The government will have to provide a healthcare program not just to be as healthy [ as other countries, ] but also to be economically competitive," he said.
Clinton also discussed the budget deficit, the rising costs of higher education, global warming, race relations and auto-industry woes. He urged the attendees to not be down about the nation's problems, highlighting the work of Chicago House.
Clinton, on numerous occasions, noted the diverse Palmer House crowd—especially in comparison to the TV show Mad Men.
"You ever watch that TV series Mad Men? If I keep watching this program, will I ever find a happy person? Great television. Good drama. But a lot of really painful reminders in that show about how Black people were supposed to run the elevators ... were supposed to ask permission before they get on an elevator. The way women were treated is appalling, and only occasionally funny to me."
Clinton told the tale of a 15-year-old HIV-positive boy in Rwanda whose parents already had died of AIDS. The Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative built him and his sister a new home. Clinton spoke to the youngster, who had only made it to the third grade because of his illness.
"I said: 'I hope you're not discouraged to go to school,'" Clinton said.
The boy replied, 'No," according to Clinton, who added that the boy then said he planned to study hard, go to medical school and become a doctor to help other sick children.
After speaking, Clinton exited the grand ballroom rather slowly—in true political fashion. He shook hands with many, posed for pictures and signed some autographs, all the while surrounded by Secret Service agents.
Todd Hamilton, the founder/managing director for Bolder Capital and a member of Chicago House's board of trustees, introduced Clinton.
"We were thrilled, so grateful," Rev. Stan Sloan, the CEO of Chicago House, said of the event. "Our board [ of directors ] stepped up to the plate incredibly."
QUOTES
COMING TO CHICAGO:
"The only picture I have of my parents — because my father was killed in a car wreck before I was born — is of them having dinner at the Palmer House, and I've got it up in my office in my barn in Chappaqua. So any time somebody gives me a chance to come back here, I do, and I thank you."
ON FORT HOOD:
"When somebody is so broken by moral conflict that they have to kill a bunch of other people, it means their identity requires them to look at people who are different and think that the differences are far more important than what they have in common as human beings, and you can see this all over the world in every place of conflict in all kinds of personal breakdowns as we saw at Fort Hood and calamitous politics."
ON HOMELESSNESS:
"By coming here and supporting Chicago House, you are basically building up the positive forces of interdependence. I know that among other things, Chicago House has helped some homeless veterans, and I think it's worth noting that on this Veteran's Day. When I was President, we spent $5 billion to try to reduce homelessness and we had 300,000 homeless people who'd been persistently homeless get permanent housing and not return to homelessness. We did a lot of work with veterans to open community health clinics so they could get health care.
"An enormous percentage of the homeless are homeless because of their health care bills. That is especially true of your HIV population and true all over America. You might be interested to know that at least until the current financial crisis, in this decade, 85 percent of the personal bankruptcies were generated by health care crises."
ON THE AUTO INDUSTRY:
"One of the reasons that all these communities in Michigan have 30 percent unemployment in the aftermath of the collapse of the automobile industry — and I grew up in the car business and I know everything I think was right and wrong with Detroit — but one of the things that killed them was General Motors had $1,500 a car in health care costs and Toyota had $110. And maybe you could spot Toyota $1,400 a car and beat them in the market, but I don't think I could."
ON EDUCATION:
"I think the Secretary of Education, who was your head of your schools here in Chicago, is doing a good job. I support that. But here's the most important negative economic statistic nearly no American knows. From the end of World War II till 2001 and every year through Republican and Democrat administrations alike, starting with the GI Bill the United States of America, no matter what was happening to us, with the rise of Japan in the '80s and the rise of Germany, all that stuff, every single year America ranked first in the world in the percentage of young adults with four-year college degrees, every year. In this decade we have fallen from first to tenth, nine places in eight years. Now, part of it is, to be fair, a lot of our competitors realize how important it is and they're spending more money to send more of their kids to college. That's good and fair
and we shouldn't begrudge them that, but an enormous part of it is when health care costs after inflation doubled, college costs after inflation went up 75 percent at a time when people's incomes was stagnant or declining and the delivery system we have is not sustainable.
"Good news is we have record enrollment today in this downturn in two-year colleges. Fourteen or 15 states have already given their community colleges permission to offer four-year courses for credit if they meet certain standards. But this is a big challenge for us, and that requires public policy changes."
ON THE AIDS SITUATION:
"President Obama signed the reauthorization of the Ryan White Bill just the other day, and that's a good thing.
"The U.S. finally ended its policy that existed when I was president — I'm ashamed to say — of prohibiting HIV positive people from visiting or immigrating to our country. And the House of Representatives passed their version of the Health Care Reform Bill.
"I spoke to the Senate democrats at their lunch yesterday and urged them to follow suit. They're doing a lot of things, but you know as well as I do, the CDC just said we have a 40 percent bigger AIDS problem than we originally thought. We've got more than a million cases in America. We have more than 56,000 cases every year. Chicago has the 6th biggest load in the country, which means you're doing a good job since you're not the 6th biggest city, you're bigger then that. You're doing well. And you should feel responsible for that.
"But if you look at where we are, there's still an enormous number of homeless people with HIV/AIDS, and a lot of it is because of health care costs. Fewer than one in five infected people in America have stable health coverage in the private insurance market. Almost half the people who are HIV positive lack access to adequate health care services notwithstanding the government programs.
"Now, when I was president, we revised the Social Security disability rules to try to help solve some of that problem, and the bill that the House passed, the Health Care Reform Bill, contains provisions that allows people with HIV and AIDS to count the drugs they receive for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program toward out-of-pocket costs that qualify for Medicare Part D catastrophic benefits. That's another good thing in the health care bill that hadn't been much publicized. And it also permits Medicaid to cover low-income people who are HIV positive, but don't have full-blown AIDS before they have to have the ARVs to live. This is a very good thing. But still we've got to deal with the fact that we have this huge homeless population of HIV positive people. It's not good for us if they're unhoused when they ought to have a home, if they're idle when they ought to be working, if they're sick when they could be well."
QUESTION: First, do you think there's a great urgency to find a cure for HIV now that medications have made the disease more manageable? And the second part, Moreover, given the amount of money pharmaceutical companies are making on HIV treatment, what do you think their motivation will be to develop a cure?
ANSWER: "You know, there was a really bad movie made about that once. Did you all see that movie where this pharmaceutical company finds a cure for AIDS and I think Brian Bosworth or somebody was in it. Then they go around killing everybody that finds out about it because, you know, they're going to screw up the ARV drug markets. I don't believe that's a problem. I think the science is hard.
"David Ho, the Chinese-American Nobel Prize-winning scientist who's done so much work on AIDS, is a very good friend of mine and we opened — several years ago we started our foundation's program in China together and — but the problem with finding a cure is that the AIDS virus, A, mutates, and B, reconfigures the DNA of a cell. So it's almost like trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
"I think, however, it is much more likely that we will find a vaccine before we find a cure, and there are lots of hopeful indications of that. And our government is continuing to spend money on it. I think they will. So I hope I live to see a cure, but if we just find a vaccine — if you look at the smallpox example, which is the last really tough global epidemic, we could get out there and do this.
"So that's one thing I think has to be funded by big operations. I do expect there to be — there's already been some fairly encouraging stuff, and let me also say there are - the real problem is getting people who are in that risk population to be tested quickly enough because you're most at risk of communicating the virus often before you have it.
"When you're early on in your infection, it's particularly virulent. And one of the things that we discovered that we're now beginning to work on in Africa — you may have seen studies. It said that in African countries where the infection rates are very high, when males are circumcised, it reduces their vulnerability to passing on the virus by 60 percent.
"So we're learning things all the time all over the world that in different contexts help us to reduce the communication. We know that the medicine that prevents mother-to-child transmission is more than 98 percent effective if the mothers know they're HIV positive and get on the regime first. So that's a big focus of what our foundation is doing now in the 30 something countries where we have health care operations as well as sell medicine.
"But my honest guess is we'll get a vaccine probably at least a decade before we find a cure, but I think we'll have a vaccine some time in the lifetime of nearly everybody in this room, and I wouldn't be surprised if it happened sooner rather than later."
