Yet Another Way to Not Get Your HIV Meds

File this one under "Can't Stand Up For Falling Down" (to quote the 60s soul duo Sam & Dave).

You've probably heard of the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, or ADAP, run by the Illinois Department of Public Health. It provides free HIV medications to financially eligible people in Illinois through a pharmacy service called PharmaCare. It's a great program, run by friendly, responsible, hard-working people who genuinely care about serving people with HIV. The program even helps people who have private insurance with big copays; if you have 80/20 prescription drug coverage through your work-based health insurance, for example, your 20% drug copays could be a few hundred dollars a month. ADAP can pick up these costs.

But in recent months, we at AIDS Legal Council have been contacted by working people caught in an impossible predicament. They have health insurance through work with big copays, and ADAP is eager and willing to help them meet those costs -- but their insurance plans will not coordinate with PharmaCare. Their plans have exclusive contracts with other pharmacy services, direct competitors of PharmaCare. And since ADAP contracts exclusively with PharmaCare, ADAP can't help. So although these folks are "the lucky ones" with private health insurance, the unmanageable copays keep their life-saving drugs out of reach.

Lots of brainpower is being applied to this problem here at AIDS Legal Council (as well as at AIDS Foundation and Health and Disability Advocates). If you've got ideas, throw them our way.