Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...high price of AIDS drugs is not limited to AZT, the antiviral medication that can cost patients as much as $550 a month. AIDS activists are assailing the high price of pentamidine, a medication that helps prevent a deadly form of pneumonia among people infected with the AIDS virus. The drug's manufacturer, Lyphomed of Rosemont, Ill., holds the exclusive license for pentamidine (brand name: NebuPent) in the U.S., where the drug retails for $110 to $200 for a month's supply...
...state programs will pay 40% of the bill, with private insurers taking care of another 40%. The remaining 20% falls in the "self pay" -- often meaning "no pay" -- category. The most important government program, Medicaid, is available 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...
...denied insurance. While such major insurers as Blue Cross/Blue Shield and the Travelers deny discriminating on the basis of AIDS, others still use information about living arrangements, residences and Zip Codes to try to identify gay or bisexual men at risk for the disease. Testing applicants for the AIDS virus gives companies additional protection against insuring infected individuals who will have high medical costs. As a result, a number of jurisdictions, including Washington and the states of Florida, Maine, Wisconsin and California, have legislatively limited such testing...
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...
...condition could have been avoided," says Dr. Kathleen Nolan of the Hastings Center in Briarcliff, N.Y. Alluding to the disease's long incubation period -- frequently ten years or more -- she adds that "the vast majority of individuals who are seropositive or who have AIDS had never heard of the virus before they engaged in the behavior that resulted in their infection...