Healthcare

San Francisco AIDS Foundation works to ensure that all San Franciscans living with HIV have access to affordable, high-quality health care and support services that promote overall heath and well-being, decrease the overall community viral load, and reduce new HIV infections. The foundation also leads national and state efforts to promote effective legislation and policies that enhance access to HIV health care.

Accessing adequate HIV medical care, substance use counseling and treatment, and mental health care requires navigating interconnected but independent systems, which is often challenging and represents a barrier to care. While the majority of HIV-positive individuals in the United States receive health care through Medicaid, other systems like Medicare, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, and, increasingly, private health insurance are all essential components of the complex network of systems that provide HIV care.

San Francisco AIDS Foundation, together with our national and state partners, leads ongoing efforts to properly fund these systems and to ensure that the regulations and policies that guide their implementation support HIV care. For example, we worked closely with the Obama administration and congress in advocating for HIV-related provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).  Since its passage, the foundation continues to push for the inclusion of those provisions as the act implemented.

Key provisions in PPACA important to people with HIV include removal of pre-existing conditions clauses from insurance policies, the ability of state AIDS Drug Assistance Programs (ADAPs) to be counted toward true out-of-pocket drug costs in Medicare, removal of lifetime insurance benefits caps, and the elimination of categorical eligibility for Medicaid—making the program available to all Americans at or below 133% of the poverty level.