Robert Greenwald

In a sign of growing government interest in rising prescription-drug costs, federal officials on Thursday said state Medicaid programs may be violating federal law by denying patients expensive hepatitis C medications. They also asked drug makers to provide information on their pricing arrangements with health insurers, which officials said could help ease the financial burden on state budgets...Patient advocates praised CMS’s guidance to states, which they said would help increase the availability of treatments for patients. Robert Greenwald, director of Harvard University’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, said in an email that his group “applauds CMS for clearly articulating that restricting access to HCV treatments solely on the basis of cost and using medically unjustifiable criteria is unacceptable.”

...Rojas is one of an estimated 3.2 million Americans with hepatitis C, an infection that attacks the liver. In the United States, hepatitis C kills more people every year than HIV. Drugs like Harvoni promise to cure more than 90 percent of patients, yet many insurance providers only authorize treatment if a patient has extensive liver damage, or a “fibrosis score” of three or four...Some of these policies are on shaky legal ground, according to Robert Greenwald, director of Harvard Law School's Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, Cambridge, Massachusetts. For example, Greenwald believes some state Medicaid programs are violating federal Medicaid law with excessive hepatitis C prior-authorization rules. In addition, private insurance companies are violating their own contracts, which promise to provide “medically necessary” services to covered patients. “They are completely abrogating their obligation to provide these services in hepatitis C solely based on cost,” Greenwald said.

Federal and state Medicaid officials should widen access to prescription drugs that could cure tens of thousands of people with hepatitis C, including medications that can cost up to $1,000 a pill, health care experts have told the White House. The experts, from the Public Health Service and President Obama’s Advisory Council on H.I.V./AIDS, said that restrictions on the drugs imposed by many states were inconsistent with sound medical practice, as reflected in treatment guidelines issued by health care professionals and the Department of Veterans Affairs. ...But Robert L. Greenwald, an expert on health law and policy at Harvard Law School, said: “These criteria defy clinical guidelines and best practices. Rather than recommending the exclusion of people who inject drugs, we should encourage earlier treatment as a way to prevent transmission of the virus.”

The spread of hepatitis C could be grossly underreported, with fewer than 1 percent of cases reported to federal public health officials, while tens of thousands could be undetected, according to researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital who say the growing opioid crisis is 
fueling the problem....Another study out this week, co-authored by Robert Greenwald, director of Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy, focused on the difficulty addicts have obtaining Medicaid coverage for costly medications. A highly effective drug, Sovaldi by Gilead, costs about $84,000 for a 12-week course. “We are seeing a decrease in cost of treatments, and haven’t seen a commensurate lessening of coverage restrictions,” Greenwald said. Under some programs within MassHealth, patients must be sober for at least six months — which cuts many addicts out of treatment.

A new study has found that the majority of state-run Medicaid programs are creating formidable barriers to patients with the potentially deadly Hepatitis C virus from being treated with new wonder drugs that can cost as much as $1,000 a pill. The joint study by researchers from Harvard Law School, Brown University’s Department of Medicine, Rhode Island’s Miriam Hospital, and the Kirby Institute of Australia was published Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine...Robert Greenwald, a professor at the Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy and a co-author of the study, said that he began the research with the idea there were restrictions in place but that he didn’t anticipate the breadth of these restrictions. “I think there is evidence that they are rationing based on cost,” Greenwald said in an interview on Tuesday, adding that “the sad reality” is that states are withholding treatment to many despite receiving rebates or discounts from the drug manufacturers of 23 percent or more.

State-run insurance programs for the poor may be putting up illegal barriers that prevent people with hepatitis C from getting a new treatment, a new study suggests. "We had this idea that there were restrictions in place, but we didn't anticipate the breadth of these restrictions," said study author Robert Greenwald of the Center for Health Law and Policy at Harvard Law School in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

While the health care rights of low-income individuals living with chronic illnesses are under attack by interests seeking to undermine the Affordable Care Act, advocacy by Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation (CHLPI) has directly led to one health insurance provider making a significant change to protect its patients.

Insurance companies may have found a way to skirt one of Obamacare's most popular promises: equal access to insurance coverage for patients with preexisting conditions…"Insurance companies have a long history of undertaking practices designed to restrict [high-risk pools]—through preexisting-protection preclusions, and higher premiums," said Robert Greenwald, director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School. "All those options are now off the table clearly and explicitly. So what we're seeing instead are other practices—lack of transparency, failing to cover other medications, refusing to accept third-party payments, or the tiering of medicines."

The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation (CHLPI) of Harvard Law School released the report “Food is Medicine: Opportunities in Public and…

Robert Greenwald, director of Harvard Law School’s Health Law and Policy Clinic, has been promoted to full Clinical Professor of Law, Dean Martha Minow has announced.

For the third year in a row, Robert Greenwald, director of Harvard Law School’s Health Law and Policy Clinic, was awarded a Positive Leadership Award from the National Association of People with AIDS.