The 1990s Medicine and Health: Overview

American medicine in the 1990s made great technological advances, but the federal government's failure to reform the country's health-care system prevented many Americans from reaping the benefits of those advances. During his first term in office, President Bill Clinton fulfilled his campaign promise to address health-care reform by appointing his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to chair a commission to study the issue and propose sweeping changes. In the end, the commission's proposals pleased no one, the U.S. Congress refused to act, and millions of working but uninsured Americans continued to live in fear of a sickness or an injury that could leave them bankrupt.

Another group of individuals who faced the fear of bankruptcy were those who suffered from AIDS. The epidemic, first identified in the 1980s, continued throughout the 1990s, growing in the United States during the first part of the decade. With the development of new drugs, the death rate from the disease began to decrease as the lives of those newly infected with HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) were extended. AIDS no longer became an immediate death sentence, but the drug therapy that kept people alive was very expensive, and medical insurers and pharmaceutical companies refused to make price concessions.

The controversial issue of abortion that had pitted Americans against one another since the 1970s continued into the 1990s, taking a hostile turn. Some antiabortion groups advocated violent terrorist tactics, not only picketing abortion clinics across the country but also bombing them and setting them on fire. Some extreme abortion opponents even gunned down physicians and other clinic personnel on the street or in their homes. Many on both sides of the issue decried such violence, but the debate over the legal right of abortion in the country remained heated.

Rapid improvements in medical technology in the 1990s brought about such scientific breakthroughs as gene therapy and cloning. With the promise of improving lives, these advances also raised troubling ethical and legal questions. Few individuals maintained that human gene therapy should not be used, especially if it can cure genetic disorders. Some feared, however, that if scientists can cure those disorders, they can also design individuals in accordance with the cultural and intellectual fashion of the day. Other saw further abuse through cloning. At the heart of the issue was the idea of humans tampering with life in a way that could harm society, either morally or in a real physical sense. Scientists fully agreed that further research was needed in the fields of gene therapy and cloning.