Pol to city: Cover drug you tout

When the city rolled out statistics last year showing an alltime low rate of new HIV infections, it pointed to a drug that can drastically reduce the risk as the main reason — and urged anyone at risk of contracting HIV to start taking it.

But some city workers who tried to heed their employer’s advice and get a prescription for pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, were in for a surprise: Some New York City health insurance plans do not cover the very drug its health department has evangelized.

“I was really taken aback ... when I heard from city employees who told me that they were attempting to get PrEP through their health insurance and they were unable to,” Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who is HIV-positive, told The News.

PrEP refers to preventive drugs for people who don’t have HIV but are at risk of it — and are increasingly being prescribed to men who have sex with men.

PrEP has been the centerpiece of a $23 million investment in fighting AIDS, and the city is targeting at-risk women, whose HIV infections in the city have risen as men’s have fallen to take the drug.

Johnson this month followed up on a letter to Labor Management Commissioner Bob Linn he’d sent in May.

“While New York Medicaid and most private insurance companies cover PrEP, lack of coverage under city health plans is glaring,” he wrote.

“This administration made the first significant changes to the city’s health plans in decades while also contributing to union welfare funds, which give most city workers access to medications like PrEP,” a spokesman for the mayor’s office said.

Unions determine which drugs are covered by supplemental funds. Workers whose unions don’t have such funds can buy a rider that does cover PrEP at “modest copays.”

But Johnson noted in his letter that workers whose unions have a welfare fund that doesn’t cover PrEP can’t buy that rider — making the cost prohibitive.