The High Cost of Mainstreaming AIDS
Those who argue its time to “mainstream” AIDS should take a closer look at President Bush’s health care proposals. Bush’s proposal is premised on the odd notion that insurance obscures the true costs of health care and if people knew how much things cost they would opt for less or no care. And, this is a good thing?
In furtherance of this goal, the President would reform the tax code to drive people to buy insurance with less coverage by taxing those whose policy premium is more than $7,5000.00 for an individual plan or more than $15,000.00 for a family plan. Not surprisingly, the premiums of people with chronic illness tend to be higher than the standard deduction. So, under the President’s plan, people with HIV could look forward to not only dealing with a chronic, episodically critical illness, but paying more for the pleasure.
Modern medicine has been able to work miracles and miracles are expensive. Perhaps instead of trying to make the miracle harder to access, we should look to ways to reduce administrative costs. It was estimated in the ‘90s that 25 cents of every health care dollar was spent on administrative costs. No one thinks this has lessened. But of course, that would entail restructuring profitable business entities. Instead, the ongoing focus of health care reform has been to restrict access to care for the consumer. Bush proposes to upend a system that works, albeit expensively, for most people for the benefit of the uninsured, one-sixth of the population.
Perhaps instead of shoehorning everyone into a seriously broken health care system we should make AIDS exceptionalism the standard for health care for all and look for ways to restructure the industry. Of all the players in the health care system probably only those who actually need medical care would support this. But shouldn’t they count for something?
