Hepatitis C drug battle. What’s going on?

Just give me the cheapest one Makers and buyers of new Hepatitis C drugs have been slugging it out in public lately. What’s going on and what are the broader implications? Pharmacy benefit managers, health plans and drug makers have been gearing up for this fight for a while. Many baby boomers contracted Hepatitis C from IV drug use and other excesses back when they were flower children. But available treatments have been difficult to tolerate and not always that successful, so as a result there is a huge pent up demand for an easy-to-tolerate, curtive treatment. Enter Gilead with its Sovaldi (sofosbuvir). The roughly $85,000 price tag for a course of treatment is pretty high, but Sovaldi is not nearly as expensive as some other specialty products that no one makes a big stink about. The real issue here is the large number of potential patients and the overall near term financial impact of Sovaldi on those who are paying the bills. Sovaldi has a decent value proposition, too: save money and improve quality of life by avoiding liver transplants. Meanwhile, payers led by Express Scripts, a large pharmacy benefit manager, have been beating the drum against the high price of Sovaldi. They have been talking out of both sides of their mouth: they don’t want price controls (after all, that would put them out of business), but they do want lower prices that they consider to be fair. Express Scripts has been licking its wounds for some time, writing big checks to Sov...
Source: Health Business Blog - Category: Health Managers Authors: Tags: Health plans Pharma Source Type: blogs