The public outrage over high-priced hepatitis C drugs is taking a new twist as Louisiana’s top health official is proposing using an obscure federal law to get the medicines at a much lower cost, Kaiser Health News reports. If successful, other states could reap the benefits.
Right now, covering treatment for the 35,000 of Louisiana’s uninsured and Medicaid-dependent residents with hepatitis C would cost the state $764 million.
“We don’t have the resources,” says Louisiana Department of Health Secretary Dr. Rebekah Gee.
In an April 12 letter, Gee reached out to the nation’s top health experts to explore tapping a patent law created in 1910 that gives federal regulators the power to appropriate inventions and develop a product in the interest of the public good.
The law has been used before by government agencies, including the Department of Defense. In the 1960s and early ’70s, the government used it to buy several medicines at a lower cost, says Hannah Brennan, who co-authored a 2016 paper on the law.
In response to Gee’s request, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, an associate dean at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, spent a recent afternoon with some of the country’s top academic and legal health officials considering the challenges of using the law, called U.S. Code Section 1498 under Title 28. They concluded it should be tried.
“This is the path that would be the most viable to be able to get what you need for people in Louisiana,” Sharfstein told the group.
Sharfstein, a former Maryland health secretary, was also the Food and Drug Administration’s deputy commissioner in the Obama administration.
Under the law, the Trump administration could sidestep patents and contract with a generic supplier to provide a lower-priced version of expensive antiviral drugs such as Sovaldi and Harvoni, which are made by industry leader Gilead Sciences.
The government would have to pay the drugmaker only reasonable compensation and prove that using the product benefits the U.S. government. And a favorable ruling for Louisiana would mean the strategy could be used across all 50 states.
Gee, who is working to raise bipartisan support to force a change in hepatitis C drug prices, says she believes the use of the patent law could be a “win-win” for the state and industry.
“Pharma needs to think about different approaches to profitability,” she says. “Sometimes quantity can be an important driver of profit, not just the price of each unit of this drug.”
