Researchers looked at prescribing trends for hepatitis C patients and determined that “millions of Americans…could be cured [of the disease] with antiviral drugs they are not receiving.”
Prescriptions rose “rapidly when the drugs were first introduced in 2013, then peaked in 2015. After that, use began to decline and has fallen sharply in recent years.”
Hepatitis C is most often spread through the U.S. by drug use, but it can “also spread from a mother to her child during birth and, less commonly, through sexual activity. Many people are unaware they have the virus because symptoms such as jaundice, fatigue, fever, and nausea don’t appear until significant liver damage has occurred. It’s estimated that up to four million Americans have chronic hepatitis C infections.”
In 2015, over 185,000 courses of the drugs were administered to patients. For 2025, however, that number had plummeted below 70,000. Medicaid restricted prescriptions to patients with advanced liver scarring in the drugs’ early days. Experts estimate that “roughly 260,000 treatment courses need to be administered each year to meet the national target to eliminate the virus.”
