Pay now or pay more later: Treating hepatitis C

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The price of curing hepatitis C in the long term is much cheaper than the ongoing expense of older therapies or delayed treatments, including liver transplants, according to a group of studies published this month in a special edition of the American Journal of Managed Care.

“Many policymakers have focused on what they see as a high price for three months of therapy, but the value of curing hepatitis C lasts a lifetime,” said Darius Lakdawalla, Quintiles Professor of Pharmaceutical Development and Regulatory Innovation at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.

An estimated 3.5 million Americans suffer from hepatitis C, and half have not yet been diagnosed, according to federal health statistics. Most hepatitis C patients are baby boomers who became infected through blood transfusions before the 1980s, when new federal regulations for the blood supply went into effect. A record number of Americans – 19,659 – died of hepatitis C in 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week.

According to the researchers who led the studies, only 13 percent to 36 percent of U.S. patients who have chronic hepatitis C (HCV) have been treated and even fewer have completed the treatment regimen that would wipe out their disease.

The economic studies were funded by the Illinois-based pharmaceutical company AbbVie Inc., and were conducted by teams of national researchers, which included Lakdawalla. The studies showed that financing treatment of hepatitis C would not only save lives but ease future costs for Medicare and reduce the need for liver transplants.

The researchers also found that an expansion of screenings and treatment to all hepatitis C patients, regardless of what stage of the disease they are in, would generate more than $800 billion in benefits – due largely to improved health and longer lives – over 20 years.