The combination of new cures for hepatitis C, the high cost of those cures, and the large population of low-income people suffering from the disease has the nation’s Medicaid directors asking for help from Congress.

“Medicaid programs have decades of experience providing care to medically complex patients, but Hepatitis C is the first real case where a very high per patient cost has been combined with a very large patient population needing treatment,” the National Association of Medicaid Directors declared in a recent news release.

To help them address the high cost of providing a new generation of drugs to the estimated one million Medicaid recipients with hepatitis C, Medicaid directors have asked Congress to introduce policies that reduce the prices of those drugs or give states bigger rebates for purchasing them, noting that states have neither “…the financial capacity to cover the full cost of these treatments” nor “…the clear statutory authority to effectively and efficiently administer the program.”

Learn more about the challenges state Medicaid programs face when serving beneficiaries with hepatitis C and the help they seek from Congress in this news release from the National Association of Medicaid Directors.