LA HEPATITIS C TREATMENT - Hepatitis C kills more Americans than all other infectious diseases combined, that includes influenza, HIV, any illness that you can catch from another person. There is a drug that has a 95% cure rate but it is very expensive, about $24,000 for a course of treatment. Recently a deal was announced between a major drug manufacturer and the state’s Department of Health system to treat Louisianans affected with this fatal disease at a much lower cost. Dr. Rebecca Gee is head of Louisiana’s Department of Health, she told Public Radio WRKF in Baton Rouge what’s at stake.
When you think of the at least 37,000 people on Medicaid and even more if you add in the correctional system, it's tens of thousands of people with a very expensive illness, but the price was a real problem. When we looked at trying to cure everyone with this disease in Louisiana, for Medicaid alone it would have cost over $750 million, and that was more than our K-12, Correctional and all administrative functions of government spend combined.
The plan has been called the "Netflix model" of drug pricing, a new purchasing model aimed at making high-cost drugs more affordable. Under the plan, the state will pay a set fee for unlimited access to the drug for a pre-determined period, similar to how Netflix charges people a subscription fee that allows for unlimited access to its TV shows and films.
"This is an unique opportunity in a short period of time to have access to unlimited drug," Gee explained. "So we want to take advantage of that by making sure that everyone who has the virus gets treated and cured."
Louisiana put out a request for offers to drug manufacturers… The drug-maker Gilead responded and has authorized its subsidiary Asegua Therapeutics to distribute the Hep-C medication that typically costs $24,000 per treatment to the state's Medicaid patients and patients in state prisons in unlimited quantities for the next five years.
