Patients with private health insurance will soon have the option to get HIV prevention medicine, otherwise called pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP, at no expense after a recommendation from an influential health-care panel Tuesday.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force gave PrEP a grade A recommendation, which means insurers will currently be committed to cover the medication at no expense to their policyholders. Under the Affordable Care Act, all the more commonly known as Obamacare, private health plans are required to cover preventative services that the task force grants an “A” or “B” rating.
The suggestion was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The task force, which is made up of an independent panel of clinicians and scientists, said it discovered convincing proof that PrEP is of “substantial benefit in decreasing the risk of HIV infection.”
The task force likewise proposed customary HIV screening for pregnant ladies and people matured 15 to 65 years.
“The new guidelines show a maturation of evidence and policy in HIV medicine and a growing consensus affecting application, not only in the United States but worldwide,” Dr. Hyman Scott, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, wrote in an editorial published Tuesday alongside the JAMA report. He is not a member of the task force.
Roughly 1.1 million individuals in the U.S. are right now living with HIV, and almost 40,000 Americans become contaminated with the virus every year, as per government information. PrEP can diminish the danger of contamination by up to 92% in individuals who are at high hazard and who take the drug consistently, as indicated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The move comes in the midst of President Donald Trump’s pledge to end the HIV epidemic in the United States by 2030, an objective which public health advocates have cheered and have sought for years.
In May, pharmaceutical mammoth Gilead Sciences achieved an agreement with the Trump administration to donate its PrEP medication Truvada for up to 200,000 uninsured individuals a year until 2025. Without insurance, Truvada usually sells for $1,600 to $2,000 a month in the U.S.