Last week, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS put a price tag on achieving universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support: $50 billion a year. CGD senior fellow Mead Over writes that while HIV prevention programs can indeed be seen as an investment that will yield large returns, in terms, for example, of reductions in future infections, global AIDS treatment programs look more like entitlements with questionable benefits beyond the additional years of life for the recipients but with huge and rising costs. The biggest cost, Over says, is that the unprecedented level of spending on a single disease is likely to come at the expense of other health and development budgets. By one calculation, he writes, $50 billion is also the cost of attaining all eight of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.
