How to Slow AIDS and Save Health Dollars
The number of reported AIDS cases among gay men has slowed dramatically in the last three years – shortly after the life-prolonging drugs AZT and aerosolized pentamidine were introduced. But AIDS is still raging unabated among intravenous drug users.
Why? Federal researchers think the primary reason is that this group – mostly poor blacks and Latinos – don’t have access to these therapies. Partly that’s because federal dollars won’t pay for it. That should be changed.
Those pricey medicines can delay the onset of deadly symptoms, but are generally unaffordable for those who are infected and indigent. That ought to offend our sense of fairness; it certainly erodes our faith in the health care system. Worse still, it condemns the most unfortunate members of society to an earlier death than is necessary.
Federal officials have paid lip service to delivering better health care to those stricken with the AIDS virus from impoverished inner city areas. But when it comes to paying the bills for such treatments, the feds have in effect skipped town without leaving a forwarding address. Medicaid doesn’t pay for these therapies during the early stages of HIV infection, when they could be most effective.
Does this strategy save the feds money? Hardly. Without life-prolonging drugs, people infected with HIV will develop full-blown AIDS that much sooner – running up huge hospital bills that drain government coffers. By buying time, the HIV-infected are buying a chance that new and better therapies will be developed that could save lives and money.
After years of dismal news for those infected with the AIDS virus, these life-prolonging drugs and drug experiments are reasons for some optimism. How cruel to deny what hope there is by not making them available to the most vulnerable.
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