Quote Originally Posted by DonMike View Post
Yeah, but James, saying that bug chasers should not get medicare is like saying that anyone who smokes, or doesn't eat healthy and exercise should not get care. You have cancer? Well, you smoked all your life, you don't get any neener neener neener. What good will that do? How about anyone who engages in risky behavior? People who ride motorcycles without helmets. People who surf (yeah, say you're being safe but anything could happen out there). You can deny someone medicare because of their lifestyle.
I'd say there's one big difference. Smokers aren't smoking to get cancer. Fat people don't get fat to have heart disease. Bikers don't ride motorcycles to get in accidents. Surfers don't surf in order to get eaten by sharks.
Bug chasers become HIV positive, unless I suppose they're really terrible at it. This is the culmination of the lifestyle. Then they go on drugs to keep from dying and enjoy their newfound community.
Health insurance is in case you have an accident. It does cost more if you have a riskier lifestyle. If you were running a health insurance company and one of your clients informed you that they were going to actively acquire a disease that would cost you thousands a month, and wanted you to cover them, you'd say "Hell no!" A biker might get in an accident, and they might not. They aren't 100% guaranteed to get in that accident, and if they wipe out on the freeway, there's a good chance that they won't need any medical services. You can figure out the margins on that so you could cover bikers, and average everything out so the income from 100 bikers covers the guy who gets in a survivable accident. If 100 bug chasers are going to get HIV on purpose, who's going to pay. They're sticking it to everyone else. That's an abuse of our system.
The cost of HIV drugs look to be around the same as sending a kid to college on a scholarship. If it actually came down to that choice of, sponsoring the lifestyles of a million bug chasers or sending a million underprivileged kids to college, would you really turn down those million kids and tell them that you need to finance the lifestyles of fools instead. Then again, if you're not paying out a dime to those million bug chasers and they have to come up with all the money on their own, how many of them stay bug chasers? How many of them see two or three thousand a month to stay alive as enough disincentive to keep them bug chasing. Would you deny them that drug coverage, if it meant that half of those million wouldn't contract HIV? If you could prevent a 500,000 from contracting an expensive wasting illness by condeming the others to indefinite financial hardship or perhaps quicker deaths, would you?
To put another way, would you let 500,000 become infected because you didn't want to tell a million that they were on their own if they followed through with their stated goals.

By the way, you didn't mention meth. From my understanding serious gay meth users have a near 100% chance of getting HIV if they don't quit soon enough. I didn't say we should ban them from HIV drugs because they're not actually out to get HIV, and telling serious drug addicts that the state wouldn't pay for their HIV drugs probably wouldn't slow them down.