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The Turnbull government will spend more than $1 billion to make breakthrough hepatitis C cures available to all as part of an ambitious new plan to eradicate the deadly disease within a generation.
Health Minister Sussan Ley will announce the major new Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme listing on Sunday, in a move that will give Australia’s 230,000 hepatitis C sufferers affordable access to the drugs.
The drugs can currently cost patients up to $100,000. Under the subsidy, they will be available for the normal PBS co-payment of $37.70 for general patients and $6.10 for concessional patients.
In what is being billed as the biggest PBS announcement since the government started funding the HPV vaccine Gardasil, the drugs – Sofosbuvir with ledipasvir (Harvoni), Sofosbuvir (Sovaldi), Daclatasvir (Daklinza), and Ribavirin (Ibavyr) – will be subsidised from March next year.
The move will make Australia one of the first countries in the world to publicly subsidise the drugs for their entire population, no matter what a patient’s condition is or how they contracted the disease.
Crucially, the government will work with state and territory governments to make the treatments available to inmates in prison, where hepatitis C rates are typically very high.