TV REVIEW : ‘Frontline’ Examines the Burden of AIDS on Health Care System

“Who Pays for AIDS?” is the question PBS’ “Frontline” tackles tonight in an examination of the burdens placed on the health care system by AIDS (9 p.m. on Channel 15; 10 p.m. on Channels 28 and 50).

In particular, the program shows the wrestling match going on between local, state and federal governments over who is going to have to pay the medical costs for AIDS patients. The program focuses on a Kansas City man who has no private health insurance and whose medical bills hit $125,000 last year.

The national bill for caring for all AIDS patients soon will reach $8 billion to $10 billion per year, according to “Frontline.” Half of the country’s 56,000 AIDS patients have no private health insurance--which means taxpayers must absorb half the costs.

The big question, however, is which taxpayers. Not surprisingly, most financially strapped local health care providers interviewed by producer/reporter Martin Smith--whether in New York City or Dallas or San Francisco--favor the one the farthest away politically and with the deepest pockets: the federal government.

But the federal government, represented by Dr. William Roper of the Health Care Financing Administration, opposes emergency AIDS funding. He argues that if “we put special money into AIDS . . . we will not be able to put money into cancer treatment or children with handicapped conditions. . . . We should not make special carve-outs of money for people with one diagnosis.”

Roper comes across as the heartless federal bureaucrat, especially when juxtaposed with the doomed AIDS patients whose sorry medical and psychological traumas are compounded by the degrading bureaucratic horrors of qualifying for and receiving federal financial help from Medicaid through Social Security.

The program has several emotional moments but is rather slow. It seems mostly interested in proving that AIDS--which, despite being called an epidemic , is still mostly a serious problem among specific high-risk life-style groups in such urban areas as New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles--is a national problem that demands more federal money (though, naively, without the red-tape attached).