Health care crisis: Lack of Therapy for HIV/AIDS patients

Health care crisis: Lack of Therapy for HIV/AIDS patients
By Carlos T Mock, MD
July 1st. 2010



The weak economy is crippling the government program that provides life-sustaining antiretroviral drugs to people with H.I.V. or AIDS who cannot afford them.

As with other safety-net programs, ballooning demand caused by persistent unemployment and loss of health insurance is being met with reductions in government resources. Without reliable access to the medications, which cost patients in the AIDS Drug Assistance Program an average of $12,000 a year, people with H.I.V. are more likely to develop full-blown AIDS, transmit the virus and require expensive hospitalizations.

In many states, there is a sense of reverting to the 1980s and early 1990s, before the development of protease inhibitors reversed the rise in AIDS deaths.

Is this an example of “The best health care system in the world?” We are been reduced to a third world status where a lack of antiretroviral drugs is the "biggest" problem facing HIV/AIDS treatment programs in Africa, according to Robert Colebunders, a Belgian researcher at Uganda's Infectious Disease Institute at Mulago Hospital in Kampala.


Dr. Carlos T Mock is a native Puerto Rican who resides in Chicago, IL and Three Oaks, MI. He has published four books and is the GLBT Editor for Floricanto Press in Berkley, CA. He contributes columns regularly to Windy City Times in Chicago, Ambiente Magazine in Miami, Camp Newspaper in Kansas City. He's had several OP-Ed published at the Chicago Tribune. Inducted in the Chicago Gay & Lesbian Hall of Fame October 18th, 2007. He can be reached at: http://www.carlostmock.com/