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Treating Hepatitis C in the US: Measuring impact
and value in the context of other major health interventions
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Reported by Jules Levin
AASLD 2015 Nov 13-17 San Francisco
Mai T. Pho MD MPH1, Andrew I. Aronsohn MD1, Benjamin P. Linas MD MPH2,
Daniel C. Johnson MD3, Jake Morgan BA2, William Padula PHD3,
David O. Meltzer MD PHD1
1. University of Chicago Department of Medicine and 3. Department of Pediatrics
2. Boston University School of Medicine
3. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Presented at The Liver Meeting© 2015
Funded by: AHRQ K99/R00HS022433
"Net health benefit of HCV treatment is very large even at current cost"
"....providing treatment for all will cost an estimated $136 BN in the US over next 5 years.....The costs of therapy were assumed to be 45% of the wholesale acquisition costs based on reported discounts and rebates.
....The Net Monetary Benefit of HCV therapy ranged from 330 billion to 5 trillion dollars based on a VSL ranging from of 1-10 million dollars.......the NMB of hepatitis C therapy far outstrips that of X ray shielding and the influenza vaccine................Our analysis does not account for secondary transmission of hepatitis C, and thereby presents a conservative assumption of the health benefits of therapy"
from Jules: this is a nice study comparing the Net Health Benefit of treating HCV in the US to that of the influenza vaccine, the Clean Air Act and X-Ray Shielding. Regardless in my opinion the federal govt is obligated to treat all with HCV and to immediately conduct routine HCV screening and link all to care & to provide immediately curative HCV treatments to all without restrictions. Not doing this reflects the stigma of HCV & injection drug use, the reason insurers & the federal govt are doing this is because HCV is considered a disease afflicting injection drug users. If we had a cure for cancer or heart disease the federal govt would not restrict access to treatment & would do routine screening. We could eliminate an epidemic, the HCV epidemic, we have a cure, there is no virus in the history of medicine for which we have a cure. Very expensive new LDL drugs, cancer therapies & HIV therapy are lifetime treatments because they do not provide a cure and in the case of new $100,000 cancer treatments often provide only an extension of life for months.
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