Courts Force States to Provide Costly Hep C Treatment

Via Stateline 

Source: Pixabay

By: Michael Ollove

Recent court rulings and settlements have found that states cannot withhold potentially life-saving but expensive medications from Medicaid beneficiaries and prison inmates who have chronic hepatitis C. In the latest ruling, chief judge of the U.S. Southern District of Indiana Jane Magnus-Stinson said that withholding or delaying treatment from hepatitis C-infected inmates was unconstitutional, amounting to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

CHLPI Faculty Director Robert Greenwald was quoted in the article. The excerpt can be found below:

“If there were a cure for breast cancer or Alzheimer’s or diabetes, people would be storming the White House to make sure those medicines were available to everyone, you can be sure of that,” said Robert Greenwald, a professor at Harvard Law School and the faculty director of the school’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation. “But we’ve responded completely differently with the cure for hepatitis C because of the stigma associated with that disease.”

Greenwald and others insist that treating prisoners with hepatitis C is an indispensable step toward eradicating the disease in the whole population.

Read the full article here.