Canada: Ontario urged to provide better access to breakthrough hepatitis C drugs

People infected with potentially fatal hepatitis C from tainted blood are pushing Ontario to make them whole by paying for expensive breakthrough drugs considered a virtual cure for the liver disease.

Ontario’s health ministry says 341 Ontarians with stage-two liver disease or worse get Sovaldi or Harvoni pills funded by taxpayers — $60,000 for a 12-week course — under an exceptional access program.

The medications are light-years ahead of previous pharmaceuticals that had troubling side effects and did not work nearly as well.

Doctors say the triage system, in which a FibroScan (a non-invasive liver test) must meet or exceed a specific level of liver damage, can miss patients with complications that would otherwise make them eligible for taxpayer coverage.

Read more...

As Minnesota insurers limit access to hepatitis C drugs, patients chafe

Kelly Krodel thought a miracle had arrived just in time — in a drug that could eliminate the hepatitis C infection she had carried for three decades before it started to wreck her liver.

Turns out, she’s going to have to live with the virus a bit longer. As long as the South St. Paul woman is reasonably healthy, her health insurance won’t pay the drug’s five- or even six-figure cost.

“Now there’s a cure and I can’t even touch it,” she said. “It makes you so angry.”

Krodel is one of a growing number of hepatitis C patients in Minnesota caught in a bind between the exorbitant cost of the year-old medications — Harvoni, Sovaldi and Viekira Pak — and the tight restrictions insurers have used to prevent the drugs from busting their budgets.

Read more...