MOSCOW, August 8 (RIA Novosti) - A new hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, costing $1000 per pill is forcing US prison administrators to decide whether the cure is worth the high price, the New York Times reported.
“The financial cost associated with this is a huge, huge burden for states,” Dr. Kathleen Maurer, the medical director at the Connecticut Department of Correction, who also sees Sovaldi as a crucial opportunity to address a major health problem, told the New York Times.
According to a study conducted by Emory University from March to April 2014, an estimated 17 percent of US prisoners share the hepatitis C epidemic predominantly transmitted through needles shared by intravenous drug users.
The New York Times reports Sovaldi’s standard 12-week course of treatment to cost $84,000 per patient.
Prisons, unlike Medicaid programs which are legally entitled to drug discounts, generally pay retail prices for prescription drugs. The price of treating even a fraction of prisoners infected would cost billions of dollars.
Dr. Warren Ferguson, a professor at the Commonwealth Medicine Division of the University of Massachusetts Medical School told the New York Times that it could cost more than $5 million to treat the patients who would meaningfully benefit from the treatment.
To gain perspective on the situation he added that the system’s entire budget for emergency hospital care is $3 million. “Every state is talking about this,” he said.
Insurers, medical societies, labor unions, employers, and consumer groups are also concerned about the overall medical costs, John Rother, president of the National Coalition on Health Care told the New York Times.
Solvaldi, produced by Gilead Sciences, Inc. (Gilead) reports the cost of the pill is in line with other drugs for hepatitis C and is an outlier because of the cure’s rapid time frame, Gilead’s chief operating officer, John Milligan, said on a call to New York Times analysts.
The federal Bureau of Prisons released a policy document, Interim Guidance for the Management of Chronic Hepatitus C Infection, in June 2014 describing how it would allocate Sovaldi to its inmates.
Clinical Practice guidelines from Federal prisons are often used as a template for state prison systems. Medicaid programs and insurers outside the prison system are covering the drug, despite the high costs. Medicaid’s actions often influence judges in deciding what care prisoners must have access to.
Doctors traditionally treat hepatitis C patients’ symptoms rather than the disease itself. Side effects to treatments often include fever, depression and anemia.
Sovaldi, which came out on the market in December of last year has so far earned $3.48 billion in sales in the last quarter according to an official earnings press release from July of 2014.
