Treatment Cost Savings Under PEPFAR Can Be Re-Invested To Increase ARV Reach

In this post in the "Health Affairs Blog," Matthew Kavanagh, director of U.S. policy and advocacy at Health Global Access Project (GAP), and Marguerite Thorp, a research assistant at Harvard Medical School, examine how HIV/AIDS treatment funding under PEPFAR has "fallen significantly since 2008 in both absolute dollars and as a portion of total budgets -- just at a pivotal moment when investment could change the course of the epidemic." They say that cost-savings due to declining antiretroviral (ARV) drug prices and efficiencies in programs have allowed PEPFAR to continue to scale up the number of people receiving treatment with a shrinking budget, and argue that those cost savings should be re-invested in ARV treatment programs to boost the number of "treatment slots" even higher (11/29).