Year: 1990
Type: article
Abstract: Almost alone among modern industrialized nations, the United States has chosen to finance the provision of health care to its citizens through a patchwork system centered around employer-sponsored private health insurance.Employer-sponsored insurance is, at least in part, supplemented by government entitlement programs, most notably Medicare and Medicaid, for those excluded from private insurance either because, like the elderly and the disabled, they utilize too many services, or, like the poor, they cannot afford to purchase it.Private health insurance therefore represents, in our system, access to health care itself for the largest portion of the population.During the early years of the epidemic, AIDS was seen as a major challenge to this unique American health care financing system.It was commonly asserted that AIDS would inevitably undermine the financial stability of the private health insurance industry and, ultimately, its ability to provide health insurance to the American people.This assertion was, to some degree, based on early cost estimates which suggested that the lifetime hospital cost per individual with AIDS was as high as $147,000.'One officer of one insurance carrier saw AIDS metaphorically as a natural catastrophe, akin to floods, which only the federal government, with all its resources, could cover. 2 As the epidemic has unfolded it is increasingly clear that such assertions were highly alarmist and, indeed, self-serving on the part of some in the health insurance industry.'AIDS tThe opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the institutions at which they work.
Source: PubMed
Authors: Robert A Padgug, Gerald M Oppenheimer
Institution: University of Notre Dame
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W814784114