Colorado Insists on Providing Pharmacists With Prescriptions for HIV Prevention Drugs

Principally, it was birth-control tablets, then smoking-cessation medicines. Presently, Colorado is on its way to converting into one of the first states in the US to enable people to skip the doctor’s appointment and get medicines that block HIV disease at the drugstore.

More than 400 Coloradans are diagnosed with HIV each year, even though a once-per-day medicine to stop the virus has been prepared for almost a decade. It also appears as public funding for HIV inhibition and AIDS strategy has been severed in Colorado.

“We have blocking and treatment vehicles to end the HIV pandemic,” has announced Helen Burnside, director of the Prevention Training Center at Denver Health.

Many of the personalities most at risk for catching HIV — which include those who accept injectable medications, as well as people of color, women, and men who have sex with men — are most prone to have trouble obtaining health care or practice stigma at the doctor’s office.

A Case Of Demand

Some of the sufferers who visit Denver Health’s HIV clinic ride a city bus for two hours to get there, Burnside stated, noting that 70% of rural America has a drugstore within 15 miles, and 90% of cities have one within two miles. 

“We hear from our sufferers a lot that they worry they will be seen going into the Denver Health HIV clinic. Everyone understands that it’s the HIV clinic,” she stated. “Drugstores offer walk-in convenience features as well as a non-stigmatizing setting.”

More than 14,000 Coloradans are experiencing HIV. “Personalities seem to think that it’s already done, and it’s finished, but it’s not,” Herod declared as she presented her bill to the health organization. If the medicines were free to all, “we would still have so many of our colleagues and family members sitting here with us.”

The medicine to block HIV, sold under the brand name Truvada, might be up to $1,700 per month without coverage. The state Medicaid program spent $6.3 million on Truvada last fiscal year for 1,194 cases, according to data published by the state Department of Health Care Policy and Financing.

A generic form of the medication is required on the market in the fall. And starting next year, the federal government will hold PrEP a preventative medicine, meaning health plans can no longer charge a copay.

For those who are uninsured but need the HIV prevention medication, pharmacologists offer funding through a state pharmaceutical support program.

The amount of current HIV diagnoses in Colorado has been decreasing for decades, but health leaders were frightened by an uptick in the last few years.

Last autumn, the state health department advised agencies that provide testing and therapy for HIV and AIDS of budget cuts ranging from 25% to as high as 87% starting last month. The cuts were the event of lost grant funding, past mismanagement of supplies, and a new legal interpretation about how dollars are spent.

Wrapping Up

The decreases have meant less HIV testing in the community and fewer employment and counseling services at Denver Health clinic and about a dozen others. It’s frustrating for advocates who appreciated Denver a few years ago for joining the global health community is promising to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030.