While hepatitis C kills more Americans than any other infectious disease, the high costs of the medications used to treat the virus prevents many patients from being cured.
Peter Bach, MD, director of health policy and outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, believes the government could lower costs and more widely treat patients by buying Gilead Sciences, instead of its hep C medications, reports NPR.
Here are five things to know.
1. Gilead Sciences released Sovaldi — the first treatment to successfully cure hep C — in 2013. A year later, the Food and Drug Administration approved Harvoni, Gilead's sister drug to Sovaldi, according to the report.
2. At the time of their launches, Sovaldi cost more than $80,000 for a 12-week treatment, and Harvoni had a list price of $94,000. While Harvoni has decreased to about half of its original price, many Americans still struggle to pay for treatment.
3. Insurers and Medicare programs have limited patients' access and coverage to the treatments due to their high price. In the last three years, about 600,000 people have been treated with the drugs, which NPR considers a low figure since the CDC estimates 2.7 to 3.3 million Americans are infected with hep C.
4. Dr. Bach believes the government could lower the cost of hep C treatment by almost two-thirds if they bought out Gilead Sciences and sold off all its assets besides the U.S. rights to Sovaldi and Harvoni, reports NPR. Not only would the cost of treatment fall, the disease would also stop spreading, which would lower the amount of liver transplants spurred by hep C infections, according to Dr. Bach.
"There's a queue right now for liver transplants, so it will free up those livers for other people who have other diseases that we can't cure who otherwise will die," he told NPR.
5. Gregg Alton, senior vice president of Gilead Sciences, called Dr. Bach's idea thought-provoking and said it really highlights the short comings of America's drug pricing system, according to the report.
"Because we have a cure, the costs are paid in a short period of time," he told NPR. "Our payment systems have a real tough time with that because they're used to these sorts of long-term, chronic therapies that pay a little bit at a time — but, over time, cost a lot more."
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