AIDS and Health Care Deficiencies.

This article explores the moral issues and the preventive and treatment deficiencies for AIDS, as well as the systematic deficiencies beginning with a discussion of the implications of chronic illnesses like AIDS, which is now recognized as a chronic illness. The paper offers a framework for understanding AIDS in relation to several important health issues. The normal sequence of steps through which treatment drugs reach the public--screening by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration and then carefully controlled clinical trials has been altered by AIDS activists, who have created a national lobby bent on changing features of the health care system. AIDS has heightened tensions around certain moral dilemmas associated with current health care policy by raising issues of personal responsibility for illness and public responsibility for preventing and treating certain illnesses.