Systemic Barriers to Health Care Access for U.S. Women with HIV: The Role of Cost and insurance

Lack of access to health care has particularly brutal consequences for low-income U.S. women with HIV who, without regular and consistent primary care, including treatment with highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), are less likely to live long and well with HIV. This article explores barriers to basic health care encountered by a sample of 55 HIV-infected women from urban and rural Wisconsin who participated in a longitudinal, qualitative study. In a series of 10 in-depth, story-eliciting interviews over a two-year period, each woman explained in detail what it was like for her to obtain health care since becoming infected. Conveying women's subjective experiences of trying to get the care they needed, their stories highlight serious institutional impediments to health care and provide a discomfiting glimpse of the systemic forces that limit access to health itself. Findings convey how the extraordinarily high cost of U.S. health care, the unpredictable and disjointed array of out-of-pocket costs, and the complex and obfuscated intricacies of health insurance impeded women's access. They lived a paradoxical reality: having an illness they feared, needing treatment for long-term survival, and being unable to meet its costs. Each woman's story reflects deep fissures in the U.S. health care system.