`SPEND IT OR LOSE IT' MENTALITY DOOMS STATE AIDS FUND

In an astonishing example of bureaucratic ineptitude, a state-run AIDS program has spent itself into a $1.5 million to $2 million hole, and Missouri taxpayers might be left with the tab.

Missouri's Department of Health received the $2.2 million in federal grant money last April 1 to administer the program for 12 months. By the end of July, -- a scant four months later -- the entire budget was gone.

Now a senator who reviewed state contracts for the AIDS program says Missouri might be liable for the bills. Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon is looking into the matter.

Missouri Auditor Margaret Kelly is looking into the total lack of accountability and monitoring of a state agency that affects the lives of some 1,500 Missourians who suffer from the deadly disease.

Coleen Kivlahan has admitted that her Department of Health had "inadequate controls" on how the $2.2 million federal grant was spent. But she also disclosed that controls once in place were lifted last year to make more people eligible and to assure that no unspent grant money lapsed back to Washington. "Spend it or lose it" is the credo that drives unfettered spending in many government programs.

But instead of merely adding to our national deficit, the Health Department's incompetence is forcing sick people to go without prescriptions and medical care.

In Southeast Missouri, about 70 people benefit from the grant. It pays for food, housing, utilities, medicine and doctor bills for indigent or poor people with AIDS or the virus believed responsible for the disease.

The Health Department blamed the various AIDS agencies across the state for overspending. But state officials told the local agents to expand their services to ensure the federal money would continue to flow to Missouri.

That directive led the Health Department to dump a limit on prescription spending, allowing payments for acupuncture and chiropractic treatments. The department also expanded the maximum possible income of recipients. The ranks of those receiving benefits from the grant swelled from 685 people between April and August 1994 to some 1,500 people served in the same period this year.

But while it continued to dispense expanding services, the state failed to keep track of mounting bills. Kivlahan said she takes "full responsibility" for the debacle and that she will "take appropriate action to assure it doesn't happen again."

Perhaps she should start with her own resignation.

Several other state-run AIDS programs involving federal dollars manage to operate in the black. That this particular program didn't -- and spent itself into at least a $1.5 million hole -- is scandalous. Taxpayers now face paying for services that 1,500 sick Missourians must look elsewhere to receive.