Hep C patients at the mercy of greedy drug company - Australia

Here is the new magic drug that evidently is  a huge leap forward in the treatment of Hep C, with over 90% success rate in curing Hep C:

There's just one thing though. How much would you think that little pill sitting next to the container is priced at by the drug company Gilead? Well it's pretty steep:

Pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences has priced its “transformational” medicine at US$1,000 a pill or $US84,000 for a 12-week treatment. The company posted a record US$10.3 billion worth of sales of the drug in 2014 – its first year on the market. more

Which, even though the PBS here is able to subsidise it, the bean counters in the advisory committee have balked at the price. Not surprising, but health issues like Hep C aren't going to go away and the price of treating now may well be cheaper than treating complications in the future associated with liver failure. In fact 600 Australians die every year from Hep C. That's a pretty high number, and how can you put a price on a life?

An estimated 233,000 Australians have chronic HCV infection, according to the latest figures from medical researcher the Kirby Institute. Of those, 80,000 have moderate to severe liver disease and more than 600 people die every year. 

“The only way we can stop this epidemic is to get broad access to these new treatments for every Australian with the virus,” says Stuart Loveday, CEO of health lobby Hepatitis NSW. 

“It’s a shocking, life-threatening situation and, certainly, unnecessary deaths are happening. 

“We are on the cusp of a treatment revolution and we could virtually eliminate this blood-born virus from Australia within a generation but we need the necessary tools right now to allow equal treatment access,” he says. 

It would be “much more cost-effective” to treat HCV in the short term rather than to deal with significant increases in cirrhosis, liver cancer, liver transplants and deaths that are expected in the next 15 years without the new treatments, says Loveday. 

“Gilead did give 150 places for free for people on the liver transplant list but many others have been left waiting and they’re fearful that their liver disease will worsen and the delay could be months or even years,” he says. 

Patients are being driven to the brink and some are coping very badly, says Loveday. 

“We’re hearing from an agitated and angry community of people who are growing increasingly desperate. more

At the moment the Abbott gov and Gilead are stuck. We all know how bad this gov is at negotiating. Certainly the price is outrageous, but surely they could both come to some sort of agreement? Gilead is at the moment just about pricing itself right out of the market. And in one of the richest countries in the world. If we can afford a bunch of F35 lemons surely we can afford this.

Of course there's a lot of people with both HIV and Hep C. I was lucky, if you could call it that. I got Hep C years before, when Hep C was a fairly new discovery. I ended up being one of about the 20% of people that clear the virus on their own.