The escalating health care cost of AIDS: who will pay?

AIDS is a crisis that has been imposed on an imperfect healthcare system. The flaws are easy to recognize but difficult to treat. Difficult choices about who pays for the medical care for AIDS patients will be made by upper-class and upper middle-class policymakers who are influenced by their own sense of vulnerability and by an aroused public. Social prejudice and moral judgment must be set aside. While the public ethic speaks the language of social justice, public activity often speaks the language of market justice. Beauchamp (1984) cites the philosophy of Anthony Downs when he states that solving social problems "requires painful losses, the restructuring of society and the acceptance of new burdens by the most powerful and the most numerous on behalf of the least powerful or the least numerous" (p. 306). It is characteristic of the public to attend to social problems until "it becomes clear that solving these problems requires painful costs that the dominant interests in society are unwilling to pay" (p. 306). The problem of AIDS care will require painful costs; but unlike many social problems, it will refuse to be hidden, refuse to be contained, refuse to be silenced, and refuse to be equitable in the marketplace and in the social system.