Surrogates for Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama conducted a conference call last week that focused on his policy toward battling HIV/AIDS.

Obama proposes increased funding for research, care and prevention of the disease, as well as the development of a national strategy within the first year of his presidency.

Rep. Diana DeGette, vice chair of the House Committee of Energy and Commerce, said that Obama’s health car eplan requires health insurance companies to cover everyone regardless of preexisting conditions.

“As everyone knows, this is critical to the HIV/AIDS community,” she said.

Also, Sandra Thurman, former director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy under President Bill Clinton, claimed that she “can’t imagine anything more important than having a national AIDS strategy, the likes of which we have never had in the history of the epidemic for over a quarter of a century.”

The Advocate reports:

Thurman, who joined the call from Kenya, stressed the fact that Ryan White CARE Act, which provides federal funding to local programs and services for people living with HIV/AIDS, has been underfunded even as the nation continues to log 50,000 new HIV infections a year and AIDS has become the number 1 cause of death for African-American women between the ages of 15 and 44.

“We have an epidemic in the United States which, in many ways, has not slowed down,” she said, adding, “We haven’t had an increase in support and funding that’s commensurate with the challenges that we’re facing in communities that already have serious issues to deal with.”

Ryan White has essentially been flat-funded since the year 2000. Though representatives from the Obama campaign promised increases, they did not commit to a dollar amount. “We want to make sure we work with Congress to come up with the right number as we go forward,” said Neera Tanden, the Obama campaign’s domestic policy director.

Tanden added that increased funding would help limit the extent to which rural areas with an emerging epidemic have to compete for money with urban areas that already have a large population of persons living with AIDS. “We don’t need to have this divisive strategy of pitting one area against another. We should add additional funding,” she said.