The Hepatitis C Epidemic in One Picture
Hepatitis C has been in the news lately, because of amazing (and amazingly expensive) new treatments that promise to cure their life-threatening illness. While we ought to debate the expense of these treatments, we should also remind ourselves of how much we’ve been spending caring for patients with advanced disease. Here’s a picture showing the rapid rise of hospitalization for Hepatitis C, relative to Hepatitis B and HIV:
The cost of such care? $3.5 billion!