Louisiana considers radical step to counter high drug prices: Federal intervention

By Carolyn Y. Johnson July 3 at 6:53 PM

BATON ROUGE — In this city on the east bank of the Mississippi River, Rebekah Gee, Louisiana’s health secretary, presides over what she calls the “public-health-crisis cradle” of America. Poverty and poor health collide here to produce some of the nation’s worst rates of obesity, premature birth and other maladies.

Those problems are deep-rooted and hard to solve. The easy one, at least in theory, is hepatitis C, a liver-damaging virus frequently contracted by injection-drug users that can cause cirrhosis and cancer.

A handful of powerful new medicines offer high cure rates and few side effects. But because the drugs also launched with staggering list prices­ — as much as $94,500 for a 12-week course of treatment — Louisiana and other states have decided to ration care to Medicaid patients, waiting for people to get severe liver damage before providing access to the medicine.

Now, Gee is considering a radical move to get treatment to the thousands of Louisiana residents who need it but are not sick enough to qualify — asking the federal government to step in to drive prices down, perhaps by overriding the patent protections drug companies hold over the medicines.

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