‘We Can Do Better,’ AIDS Commission Pleads in Its Final Report : Disease: The panel urges Clinton to develop a national plan to confront the epidemic. It calls on Congress to fund the necessary research.

In what it described as “our final heartfelt public plea,” the National Commission on AIDS issued its last report Monday, calling upon the President, Congress and the country to face squarely the “human disaster” created by the epidemic.

“As a nation, we can do vastly better in confronting this crisis than we have to date,” the panel said.

Repeating its major recommendations from previous reports, the commission urged the President to develop a national plan to confront the crisis and said Congress should fund whatever research is necessary to find preventive and therapeutic solutions.

The commission, completing four years of work, also recommended that the federal government underwrite a “responsive” health care system for all HIV-infected people who need it.

” . . . we call on all Americans to work single-mindedly to lessen the cruel discrimination that has added such horror to the lives of those infected,” the report said. “As a nation, we can do vastly better in confronting this crisis than we have to date.”

The commission is a bipartisan panel created by Congress, and whose members are appointed by Congress and the White House. Its mandate was to advise the nation on how to deal with the burgeoning epidemic.

Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, when asked about the report at a luncheon with reporters, said that she felt the panel’s criticism was justified.

“I had breakfast with the AIDS commission today, and they said, ‘We hope you don’t take this criticism personally,’ and I said, ‘Keep criticizing,’ ” Shalala said.

“I think that until we have a vaccine and a first-class education campaign and a strategy to change the risky behavior of people in relationship to AIDS, any criticism is justified,” she added.

“I’m not going to be uptight or resentful,” she said.

For 1994, the Administration has budgeted $2.7 billion for AIDS research, prevention and treatment--a 28% increase from the year before. Since 1981, 290,000 cases have been diagnosed in the United States alone and an estimated 60% of those people have died.

The panel did not spare strong language in expressing its longtime frustration.

“This is a short, sometimes angry report tinged with sadness and foreboding,” said Drs. June E. Osborn and David E. Rogers in a statement. Osborn is panel chairwoman and Rogers is vice chairman.

“It is short, because all of what we say here has been said many times before,” they said. “It is sometimes angry because the carefully considered, widely heralded recommendations contained in our previous reports have been so consistently underfunded or ignored.

“It is sad because a potentially preventable disease continues to expand relentlessly and cause loss of life in young Americans on an unprecedented and unacceptable scale.”

Previously, the panel had attacked the Republican Administration of former President George Bush for failing to address the AIDS crisis adequately, and said in its final report that “new hope surged with the election of President Clinton.”

Nevertheless, the panel said that Clinton had thus far failed to get his AIDS effort off the ground.

The panel’s criticism of Clinton, however, was softened by his announcement Friday that he had named Kristine Gebbie as the federal government’s AIDS coordinator, or “czar.”

“We’re pleased that the Clinton Administration has finally started its engine on AIDS,” Rogers said.

The panel said--as it has before--that the federal government should design a comprehensive national strategy for prevention, care and research, and that such a plan was essential if the nation is ever to come to grips with the epidemic.

Times staff writer Sam Fulwood III contributed to this story.