When Matthew Hurley was looking to take PrEP to prevent HIV, the doctor hadn’t heard of the medicine, and when he finally did prescribe PrEP, the bills sent to Hurley were expensive … and wrong. “I decided to write in because the process was really super frustrating.” At one point, Hurley asked, “Am I just going to stop this medication to stop having to deal with these coding issues and these scary bills?” — Matthew Hurley, 30, from Berkeley, California A couple of years ago, Matthew Hurley got the kind of text people fear. It said: “When was the last time you were STD tested?” Someone Hurley had recently had unprotected sex with had just tested positive for HIV. Hurley went to a clinic and got tested. “Luckily, I had not caught HIV, but it was a wake-up call,” they said. That experience moved Hurley to seek out PrEP, shorthand for preexposure prophylaxis. The antiretroviral medication greatly reduces the chance of getting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The therapy is 99% effective at protecting people against sexual transmission when taken as prescribed. Hurley started PrEP and all was well for the first nine months — until their health insurance changed and they started seeing a new doctor: “When I brought PrEP up to him, he said, ‘What’s that?’ And I was like, oh boy.” Hurley, who is a librarian, went into teaching mode. They explained that the PrEP regimen they’d been on required daily pills and lab work every…
