Year: 1993
Type: article
Abstract: The AIDS epidemic came to public notice in the early 1980s, at a time when America's health care insurers found themselves in a crisis of constantly increasing health care costs.Commercial insurers, as well as the public, were persuaded by early cost estimates which inaccurately calculated the costs of treating AIDS and firmly established AIDS as a disease with unacceptably high costs.'When AIDS met an already-strained health insurance system, commercial insurers declared that they had to protect themselves from what they perceived as a risk of financial ruin from HIV and AIDS. 2 Years of narrowing their risk pools weakened insurers' ability to absorb AIDS treatment costs.Consequently, insurers took aggressive steps to stave off further financial difficulties by attempting to exclude victims of the new epidemic from their risk pools.Since that time, persons with AIDS have faced a constant threat of exclusion from health insurance and, accordingly, a constant threat of exclusion from health care itself.3 'See Jesse Green et al., The $147,000 Misunderstanding: Overstating the Costs of AIDS, 19 J. HEALTH POL., POLY & L. (forthcoming Spring 1994) [hereinafter The $147,000 Misunderstanding] (giving an account of the inaccuracies of one highly influential 1986 AIDS cost study).For more accurate estimates of the costs of AIDS, see Jon Eisenhandler, AIDS: Update and Reserving, 18 REC.Soc'Y ACTUARIES 673, 673-93 (1993); Daniel M. Fox & Emily H. Thomas, The Cost of AIDS: Exaggeration, Entitlement, and Economics, in AIDS AND THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM 197-210 (Larry 0.
Institution: Cornell University
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W642989440