High costs and insurance restrictions

The US Food and Drug Administration approved the first of a series of new hepatitis C treatments called interferon-free direct-acting antiviral agents in December 2013.

Wester said that when the treatment became available, the cost for a two- to three-month regimen was roughly $90,000 per person. That cost has come down due to factors like increased competition from other drug manufacturers, but it’s still a barrier to access.

She added that in order to contain their own costs, insurers put restrictions on who could receive coverage for the treatment, and people who qualify for coverage may still have to pay out-of-pocket costs.

The researchers on the new study found that people whose Medicaid program enacted at least one of these restrictions were 23% less likely to access treatment within a year of diagnosis compared with those whose Medicaid program did not enact a restriction.

Accessing treatment soon after diagnosis is important.

“Otherwise, people often fall out of care, or because hepatitis C can remain asymptomatic for years, people forget or are unaware of their diagnosis,” Wester said. “And what ends up happening is, they don’t get linked to the treatment that they need, and then they show up much later in the health system with advanced disease and complications that are much harder and much more costly to treat. In addition, we’ve lost years of opportunity to prevent transmission.”

The study was published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is not peer-reviewed, meaning it has not been validated by independent experts.

Years of declining treatment rates

The study had some limitations, including that the findings are not generalizable to people who do not have health insurance or who have disruptions in their coverage. It also did not include information about patients who are incarcerated.

The researchers looked at “patients who are diagnosed and have insurance coverage, so in many ways [these] are the individuals who are set up to have the best access to care and treatment,” Wester said on a media call Tuesday.

Additionally, the data was not specific enough to describe why each person did not receive treatment. Because the study period overlapped with the Covid-19 pandemic, many people may have been less likely than normal to seek and receive treatment due to disruptions to care. Still, hepatitis C treatment rates have been declining annually since 2015, the CDC said in an email.

“It is likely that COVID-19 disruptions played a role in the low treatment numbers in this analysis; however, other longer-standing barriers are also at play to prevent access to treatment. These include state Medicaid restrictions on what types of providers can prescribe treatment, patient eligibility restrictions, and prior authorization requirements before treatment can begin,” the CDC added. Prior authorization is a process by which insurers review whether a treatment is medically necessary before it agrees to cover a drug.

A key to ending the epidemic

“Health care providers, insurers, and policymakers and public health professionals all need to work towards removing those eligibility restrictions,” Wester said. She added that treatment should be made available in more settings, like primary care offices, and that more testing needs to be done to identify people who could benefit from treatment.

Wurcel said she remembers the day the new treatments were approved. She had made a list of patients whom she would try to get onto the new therapy. What followed was nearly a decade of a “rollercoaster” as patients have had to navigate obstacles to access.

“The only way to end the hepatitis C epidemic is to treat more, and one of the key multilevel strategies is decreasing the price of hepatitis C meds. That has to be part of the strategy aimed at eradicating hepatitis C,” she said.