I don't know anyone who's actually paying for PrEP here in the US because pretty much every provider's going to cover it, no? It's more expensive treat HIV than it is to prevent it, so if you're an at-risk individual your insurance doesn't want you getting it
Several insurance companies like UnitedHealthCare had to be sued into covering PrEP. Not many insurance companies are going to happily cover a medication that can cost ~$30,000+ a year to fill.
Even now, United is making it clear that they don't intend to cover new PrEP medication like Descovy even though the medication doesn't cause as much renal damage and failure as Truvada does: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/payer-issues/unitedhea...
If you have a high deductible insurance plan, it is not going to be fun to pay for your first few months of PrEP entirely out of pocket. Many people are priced out of PrEP because of that, as are the uninsured and underinsured.
Exactly. It's like assuming everyone has a Mercedes, a smartphone, or a butler. M4A is also not a solution for universal healthcare because Medicare isn't very good: it requires multiple types of paid co-insurance, rations healthcare, and doesn't pay doctors enough to motivate them to help patients. Medicare is a bare-bones, half-measure that doesn't offer a healthcare system. The common refrain of "It's better than nothing" is an invalid rationalization to settle for substandard healthcare.
