By Rabbi David Eidensohn
Here is a tale of two catastrophes, the curtailing of medical services for the elderly and a 25% annual increase in new HIV cases.
The New York Times, on March 17, 2002, reported that many doctors are refusing elderly Medicare patients, because the government keeps cutting its payments to doctors for Medicare. The government cut Medicare funding this year by 5.4 percent. From 2002 to 2005, the government will cut Medicare funding by 17 percent. Since many insurers pay only what Medicare does, even elderly with private insurance may be in big trouble, precisely at a time when their medical needs are the greatest, in old age.
On March 11, 2002, the Associated Press reported that pharmacies threaten to drop Medicaid. Medicare pays for the elderly and Medicaid pays for all indigent people. Fifteen states are considering cutting Medicaide payments. Many pharmacies threaten to refuse to honor Medicaid in those states. Where is our money going?
The Center of Disease Control on February 25, 2002, reported that in the past year HIV struck 50,000 more Americans. This is an increase of 25% over the previous year, when the CDC presented 40,000 new cases of HIV. We are fighting HIV by giving Gay Groups money. They take it and teach people how to have titillating homosexual sex, and form powerful lobbying and educational groups with the taxpayer's money to teach children and others how lovely gay sex is. This spreads the disease more, and they then demand a huge part of the American health dollar for new medicines and to "educate" people about sex, so that little is left over for other Americans. There is no money left for the elderly and the poor, nor is there enough money to find cures for diseases of the multitude such as cancer and heart disease.
Let us return to the fifty thousand new HIV patients in one year. What are their medical costs? The new HIV medication costs about $20,000 annually, according to the Rand Report. If so, we must multiply 50k by 20k and that gives us $1 billion dollars. This is just the medical care for the new HIV patients. These are young and will live about another fifty years. We are talking about $50 billion dollars, just for the new patients. Where will we find the $50 billion dollars? We will have to cut health services to average Americans, just as the government is doing today, giving the gays huge sums of money and cutting funding for the elderly and indigent.
What will it cost to provide medical care for the approximately 900,000 HIV-infected people in America? Each one costs $20,000 a year, so that is 20k times 900k or $18 billion dollars, just for one year and just for the medical care, not to talk about the loss to the economy from the illness and welfare. What is $18 billion dollars? This comes out to $170.64 for every one of the 105,480,101 households in the U.S.
We could stop HIV and AIDS very quickly if we listed them as infectious diseases. Any disease on the infectious disease list is called "reportable." This means that anyone going to a doctor for help with that disease is reported and must report all partners. Soon, the disease is choked, because if anyone infects another person quarantine, or jail, solves the problem for society. The gay lobby in New York State and other gay lobby states has gotten HIV and AIDS off of the infectious disease list. Thus, the gays can infect with abandon and we have to pay for it. This will destroy the economy, and it already threatens the elderly and the indigent with very reduced medical services, something that is truly life and death.
To understand how serious the crisis is, we must consult the U.S. Census Bureau, for 2,000. From 1990-1999, a ten-year period, Americans over 65 increased from 31,241,000 people to 34,540. However, the level of births dropped in those ten years from 16.7 births per thousand to 14.5 births per thousand. A country where births drop in a decade by an eighth, and the elderly increase by about a tenth, is coming to a point where the young can no longer support their elders. Money is now becoming scarce, and we cannot throw it away by giving it to the gay lobby, so that they can spread more disease and deprive the rest of us of our due.
12.4% of the population is over 65. Only 18.6% of the men this old and 10% of the women this old work. Those under 65 must thus support the economy. America has about zero percent growth, meaning that the number of elderly is growing relative to others, and in time only a few younger people will have to support Social Security and other programs for the retired. We are fast approaching the time when the system will collapse because of the growing pressure on the younger generation.
A census paper entitled Keeping Up With Older Adults concludes, "Of the 56 million people aged 55 and older, 9.6 percent were poor in 1999." Thus, about ten percent of the 55 and older population are poor. How can they pay for their large medical costs, the new medications and tests? They can't. The cutbacks in Medicaire and Medicaid are a disaster for them and the indigent. Do we then have the right to give the gays $18 billion dollars for their medication, caused by their own personal lifestyle, and deny it to others who are sick for better reasons?
It is time to put AIDS and HIV back on the infectious diseases list in every state, and thus stop the disease in time to save our elderly and—guess what—everybody else who hopes to be one day elderly.
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