Health Affairs Blog: The Cost Of A Cure: Revisiting Medicare Part D And Hepatitis C Drugs

This post now available at the Health Affairs Blog by Jack Hoadley of Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute, and Tricia Neuman and Juliette Cubanski, both of the Kaiser Family Foundation, updates a two-year-old analysis of Sovaldi (sofosbuvir), an oral drug  approved by the FDA for the treatment of chronic hepatitis C, and the potential impact of the new specialty drug on Medicare spending and Part D premiums.

For that 2014 piece, the authors used the best available data to estimate the number of people on Medicare who might seek treatment and the impact on Medicare spending. Here they revisit the earlier analysis using new data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and consider both the ongoing impact of hepatitis C drugs for Part D and the broader implications for Medicare of new high-priced drugs entering the market.