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AIDS Cost Analysis and Social Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2021

Daniel M. Fox  and
Emily H. Thomas
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Extract

Debates about how much it costs to treat persons with AIDS and how the burden of these costs is and ought to be distributed raise fundamental questions about social policy in the United States. The most important questions concern entitlement: Who has what obligations to provide what services to whom, under what conditions and at whose expense?

As a result of our political history, we were unprepared for the challenge of AIDS to social policy in the 1980s. We had, over a half-century, linked entitlement to medical care to age, disability, employment, and, for people with end-stage renal disease, to diagnosis. Our policies proved inadequate to pay for medical care for persons who died at considerably younger ages than normal, who were disabled for a brief period that was still long enough to end their employability, and whose condition progressed with unusual rapidity from diagnosis to death. By early 1988, it was clear that we would, as a society, assume the substantial costs of caring for persons with AIDS. Who would pay, and how equitably we would provide care, remained in debate.

Type
AIDS: Financing
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , Winter 1987 , pp. 186 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1987

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References

The research reported here from the New York metropolitan area was conducted as part of a research program awarded to the authors by Health Research Inc. under a grant from the Health Services Improvement Fund sponsored by Empire State Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Needless to say, the views we express are entirely our own. We are grateful for critical comments on this paper by Mary Cline, Anne Scitovsky, and three anonymous reviewers.Google Scholar
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