California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a proposed law that requires hospitals to offer optional HIV tests to all emergency room patients who are getting blood tests, the San Francisco Patch reports.

In a prepared statement regarding his veto of AB 521, Brown said that the demographics of people getting blood tests in ERs “does not match the demographics of the population at risk for HIV exposure.” He also added that ER staff are not equipped to counsel those who test positive.

“Limited resources would be better spent supporting outreach and education activities by existing providers, which have the staff and training for HIV testing and follow-up care,” the governor wrote.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which sponsored the legislation, disagreed with Brown. In an AHF press release criticizing the veto, Whitney Engeran-Cordova, the senior director of AHF’s public health division, said the proposed law “would have gone a long way to help California address the largely unmet CDC HIV Testing Recommendations in Healthcare Settings first issued back in 2006. The governor’s statement that we should be focus on high-risk populations is contradictory to the CDC recommendations that everyone between the ages of 13 and 65 be offered routine HIV testing at least once.

“There are approximately 5,000 new HIV infections each year in California," Engeran-Cordova added, “and outreach and education hasn’t found those new infections. Continuing to do nothing more than what we’ve been doing will perpetuate this epidemic, not end it. This bill would save millions more in keeping people from getting infected than it will ever cost. Unless the governor has another plan for preventing those 5,000 new infections every year, we vow to reintroduce similar HIV testing legislation in the future.”