In this New York Times story, "Early HIV Therapy Sharply Curbs Transmission," I was brought up short by this wrenching, and morally execrable, paragraph:
"Although the evidence suggests that it would be good public health policy to lower infection rates by starting everyone on drugs as soon as they are infected, that is impossible in much of the world. For lack of money, clinics in Africa are turning away patients who are not just infected but close to death. And in some American states where money provided by the Ryan White Act has run out, poor uninsured people are on waiting lists."
It is certainly NOT impossible. It's possible to treat people who are infected worldwide, it's just not policy.
People infected with HIV don't have access to life-saving drugs only because current global health programs are so underfunded, and the US government and capitalistic drug companies have tried to stop cheap generic versions (see this example from 2010). Far from being impossible, it should be morally unthinkable to allow current conditions to continue. It should be unthinkable that we would know people are sick and can't afford medicine, we know we have affordable drugs that could save them, but we turn our heads away (see a previous editorial I wrote on this issue).
It is quite possible to change these policies: the HIV advocacy and activist communities around the world has had great success at making progress along these lines (see, for example, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, Doctors Without Borders Campaign for Essential Medicines, and the Health Global Access Project), but the Obama administration has proposed cutting funding (see Bishop Tutu's response), and recent US Congressional action by Republicans slashing funds is even more callous. Such cuts, unless they are stopped and reversed, could result in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of people.
Claiming that it's impossible to provide basic medical treatment for all is both factually incorrect and morally indefensible. Good journalism "afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted." Claiming that immoral policies continue because change is "impossible" does the reverse.
To paraphrase Bob Dylan: How many ears must one person have, before we can hear people cry? How many deaths will it take till we know, that too many people have died?