Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation

For three days in July, Jeneesa Barnes was haunted by voices. It was as if people were just out of sight discussing her flaws, picking her apart, even when she was home alone. The morning of the third day she retreated to her car, thinking she might feel safer in a small, enclosed space. But the voices remained. Something was going horribly wrong. She turned on some foreign-language pop music, trying to drown out the voices amid lyrics she couldn’t understand. She started driving. ... Seven former nurses for the company say they worried that Cerebral wasn’t merely meeting a demand but was also, by making access so easy, effectively creating it; they described a fear that they were fueling a new addiction crisis. One researcher, Stephen Wood, an acute-care nurse practitioner who worked in Massachusetts at the height of the opioid crisis, is even more blunt. Looking at the Cerebral website, he notes in particular that nurse practitioners are referred to as prescribers rather than providers or caregivers. “It doesn’t sound like they care about your well-being,” says Wood, now a visiting researcher at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. “It sounds like they care about prescribing you these medications.” The company said it uses the term prescriber to minimize confusion among the varied services it provides.

Usually, an A grade would be seen as a measure of a job well done. However, when it comes to progress toward hepatitis elimination, New York is only now getting back on track. The Empire State has work to do in order to regain our status as national leaders in this effort. As evaluated by Hep ElimiNATION, a joint project of  the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center, the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable, and the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, New York’s A grade comes with caveats, specifically a lack of dedicated, sufficient funding for proactive case finding, linkage to care and harm reduction services for New Yorkers living with and at risk of developing viral hepatitis.

The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School (CHLPI) and the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable (NVHR) today recognize the Virginia and Alaska state Medicaid programs for removing prior authorization requirements for hepatitis C treatment, effective in each state as of January 2022. Virginia and Alaska become the tenth and eleventh states in the country to remove prior authorizations for hepatitis C treatment for most patients, joining a growing number of states to increase access for Medicaid recipients.