"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Friday, September 22, 2006

Is this another sop to the insurance industry?
Posted by Jill | 7:12 AM
With the insurance industry looking to cover fewer people, and fewer pre-existing conditions, it's difficult to imagine that universal HIV testing is designed to do much other than give insurance companies another excuse to deny coverage:

In a major shift of policy, the federal government recommended yesterday that all teenagers and most adults have H.I.V. tests as part of routine medical care because too many Americans infected with the AIDS virus don’t know it.

The recommendation, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, urges testing at least once for everyone aged 13 to 64 and annual tests for those with high-risk behavior.

The proposal is a sharp break from the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when the stigma of the disease and the fear of social ostracism caused many people to avoid being tested.

That led to heated debate about whether positive test results could be shared by medical and governmental authorities in their effort to contain the epidemic by reaching out to partners of those who might be infected.

Under the agency’s plan, which states can adopt or modify if they choose, patients would be advised they were being tested, but the tests would be voluntary.

So that the tests could be easily administered, however, the agency urged the removal of two major barriers that some states now have: separate signed consent forms and lengthy counseling before each test.

That would require new laws in some states, however, which could take years because some civil liberties groups and lobbyists for people with AIDS oppose the changes.

Many doctors are expected to welcome the changes.

“These recommendations are important for early diagnosis and to reduce the stigma still associated with H.I.V. testing,” said Dr. Nancy Nielsen, a board member of the American Medical Association, which endorsed the new guidelines.

Dr. Julie Gerberding, the disease control agency’s director and a doctor who treated some of the first San Francisco AIDS patients in 1981, said: “Our traditional approaches have not been successful. People who don’t know their own H.I.V. status account for 50 to 70 percent of all new infections. If they knew, they would take steps to protect themselves and their partners.”

The new guidelines, if adopted, would move the agency toward its “ultimate goals,” which Dr. Gerberding described as: no more H.I.V.-infected children, no one living for years without antiretroviral treatment and, eventually, no more new cases of the disease.

About 40,000 Americans are newly infected each year, a number that has been remaining steady. In contrast to the early days of the epidemic, which struck gay men the hardest, many of those now infected are black or Hispanic, are teenagers and were infected by heterosexual sex. The agency estimates that 250,000 Americans, a quarter of those with the disease, do not know they are infected.


Certainly 250,000 infected Americans is a problem, and the charitable view of this proposal is one of public health -- that it behooves those who are infected and don't know it to know, so that they can take precautions to keep the disease from spreading.

The problem is that the proposal removes the counseling requirement, so those who receive a positive test result may not receive information on how to prevent transmitting the disease. That being the case, what's the point? Which brings us to the less charitable view, and that is that this is yet another way to stigmatize the largely minority population that represents the fastest-growing population with the virus; that it's a way to identify those which the insurance can identify as "uninsurable", and that it's yet another way to punish women of childbearing age for their sexual activity in an age when pregnant women with substance abuse problems don't receive treatment, but are jailed instead.

As it stands now, if you are covered under a group insurance policy, you may not be asked if you have been tested for HIV and you may not be denied coverage, but you MAY be asked if you have been treated for AIDS or ARC. If your employer self-insures, the rules are different, and if you are applying for individual coverage, you can be denied coverage based on your HIV status. So you are opening the door for insurance companies to deny coverage to even MORE Americans, at a time when over 45 million Americans already lack coverage.

And if you already have precedents where pregnant women are being jailed for endangering the fetus, the door is wide open for HIV-positive pregnant women to be jailed, even if they are NOT substance abusers. In fact, you could argue that HIV-positive women of childbearing age could be ordered sterilized or jailed, because they MIGHT become pregnant.

I'd like to believe that the drive to test all Americans for HIV is coming from a benevolent place of concern of public health. But given how the Bush Administration and its lackeys in Congress clearly work at the beck and call of business and the Christofascist Zombie Brigade, I can't trust the motives behind this sudden push for mandatory testing.
0 comments
Bookmark and Share