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The Federal Bureau of Prisons has guidelines for treating prisoners that include providing the new drugs. But the vast majority of U.S. prisoners are held in state facilities; about 1.4 million people are in state prisons, compared with about 191,000 in federal prisons.
In their study, researchers from Yale and the Association of State Correctional Administrators sent two surveys to every state prison system. The first looked at care across states — who was getting treatment, and what kind — and the second focused on how much corrections departments were paying for the new drugs, specifically Sovaldi, which was approved for use in 2013, and Harvoni, which hit the market in 2014 (there have since been several others). They found that less than 1 percent of state inmates with hepatitis C1 had received these medications in prison as of Jan. 15, 2015. Although the data isn’t current — the first survey captures the scale of treatment as of Jan. 15, 2015, and the second looked at prices paid for treatment as of Sept. 15, 2015 — it provides a snapshot of both the difference in the number of inmates with hepatitis C among states and how hard it is to negotiate drug prices.
Read more here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/prisoners-with-hep-c-get-cured-in-some-states-but-not-others/