Hoffman Chapters 6-Epilogue

Medicare was a drastic improvement to the country's health care system. After many years of hard fought battles with doctors and the associations that represented their interests, Medicare was finally introduced. It helped the elderly pay for the increasing costs of the medical care that they needed in order to stay healthy, and most of them greatly benefited from this new program. Medicaid was also added, to help support those that did not qualify for the age requirements and were unable to pay their medical costs. Even though doctors frequently denied Medicaid patients due to lack of reimbursement, it was immensely popular throughout the United States. Despite its benefits, Medicare and Medicaid had their problems, but these problems were fixable and were rather small compared to the benefits. Most of these problems resulted in the fact that hospitals were continuing the tradition of discriminating against people that could not pay their bills. A good portion of these people included females, Latinos, and African-Americans, and activists for civil rights groups protested these deficiencies in the system to no prevail. Hospitals also continued to use the "dumping" method, which helped bypass the costs they would have to incur with patients who were unable to pay. This also exacerbated the new AIDS problem, with many people around the country scared to even go near an infected person for fear of contracting the virus themselves. These were all issues that the medical profession and the general population were having to deal with during these times of great changes in the health care system.