State Paid Millions For Expensive Hep C Drug
“Dollars that were intended for a wide array of medical services started being gobbled up by just one drug,” says Charles Bacchi, president of the California Association of Health Plans. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts attorney general is launching an investigation against the company that produces the drug, Sovaldi, over its pricing structure.
KQED's State of Health:
California Doles Out Millions To Insurers For Hepatitis C Drugs
In an unusual funding arrangement, California is paying private health plans hundreds of millions of dollars in supplemental payments to cover the high price of hepatitis C drugs for patients in Medi-Cal managed care plans. (Bartolone, 1/27)
The New York Times:
Gilead Faces Fights Over Hepatitis C And H.I.V. Drugs
The attorney general of Massachusetts said on Wednesday that she had opened an inquiry into whether Gilead Sciences had violated state consumer protection laws by charging too much for its hepatitis C drugs. ... [And] on Tuesday, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a nonprofit organization that treats patients with H.I.V. and AIDS, filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate patents covering the new version of Gilead’s mainstay H.I.V. drug, tenofovir. The lawsuit also says that Gilead, to maximize product life span but to the detriment of patients, delayed the introduction of the new, safer version of tenofovir until the old version was about to lose patent protection. (Pollack, 1/27)