Word: health
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Robert Simpson tested positive for the AIDS virus last November, medical bills were the least of his worries. As a court reporter, Simpson, 44, was earning $48,000 a year and was covered by group health insurance. In addition, he had planned ahead by buying three disability policies. Less than a year later, however, he has fallen through the widening cracks in the U.S. medical- care system. Too weak to work, he has lost the insurance coverage from his job; moreover, he has yet to see a penny from his disability policies, although he filed six months...
Like Simpson, many of those caught up in the spiraling AIDS epidemic are awash in medical expenses they cannot afford. And the safety net beneath them has proved less than reassuring. Since the AIDS crisis began in the early 1980s, the nation's private health-care industry -- hospitals, insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms -- has engaged in quiet combat with government agencies over who should foot the bill for the disease, which now afflicts an estimated 44,000 Americans. And the tab is rising. This year the cost for AIDS medical care is expected to be $3.75 billion; by 1992 that...
...only to impoverished patients. As a result, those infected with the AIDS virus frequently must "spend down" into poverty, demonstrating that they hold assets of less than $2,000. This low level of federal coverage portends future problems, since the number of people with AIDS continues to rise. "Federal health planners have been acting as if AIDS will go away," says Congressman Henry Waxman of California...
Despite the substantial costs (average lifetime care for a person with AIDS: about $83,000), a fifth of those infected with the AIDS virus have no insurance at all. Increasingly, these people are flooding into overburdened public hospitals, raising fears of bankruptcies. In August the National Public Health and Hospital Institute reported that in 1987 only 5% of the nation's hospitals, most of them in inner cities, were treating 50% of the country's AIDS patients. Bellevue Hospital Center, which has one of the biggest emergency rooms in New York City, is overwhelmed to the point that care...
...mounting bills for AIDS patients have renewed a call in some quarters for a national medical-care system. "Optimistically, AIDS will push this country into getting universal health insurance," says New York City Health Commissioner Stephen Joseph. "Or we may be reduced to narrow-minded scrambling to see who gets what piece of the pie." However, the current budget crisis, plus resistance to socialized medicine, makes that prospect a far-off solution. In the short run, a combination of public- and private- sector responsibility, translated into cash, seems to offer the best hope for coping with this ongoing human crisis...