Georgia state Rep. Betty Price is not just any old Republican state lawmaker. She’s married to disgraced former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and, like him, she’s a doctor. That information is by way of context to demonstrate that Betty Price’s recent comments about people living with HIV are doubly or triply more disturbing than they might seem on the surface. Which is already damn disturbing because, in short, Price wonders if quarantine might be an option for people with HIV, being as they live so much longer than they used to.
At a state House committee meeting on access to health care, Price had some questions and comments for Pascale Wortley, the director of the HIV Epidemiology Section for Georgia Department of Health:
"And I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it. Is there an ability, since I would guess that public dollars are expended heavily in prophylaxis and treatment of this condition. So we have a public interest in curtailing the spread. What would you advise or are there any methods legally that we could do that would curtail the spread,” Price added.
(Quarantine, as it happens, is something of a legal gray area at this point, even if you were enough of a monster to want to quarantine people living with a treatable disease.)
But Price had more to say!
“It seems to me it’s almost frightening the number of people who are living that are potentially carriers, well not carriers, with the potential to spread, whereas in the past they died more readily and at that point they are not posing a risk. So we’ve got a huge population posing a risk if they are not in treatment,” Price said later during Wortley's presentation.
Gee, wasn’t it great when AIDS was a death sentence?