Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation

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.