Background for the recent members here: I was diagnosed in 2005, treated for 24 weeks in the Vertex Prove 1 trial, SVR 48 weeks post treatment. Now read on.....
I got some good advice that involved switching health insurance plans with my current carrier. The family has been covered by this carrier for years, with no major claims. The plan switch required an application, and a repeat of all the history stuff as usual. Yes, its a pain filling out endless pages of questions that the carrier has better records to answer than I do, but that's the way it goes.
I checked YES to HCV, and included a detailed summary including when diagnosed, the trial details and references, the results, and contact information for the investigator and the clinic to verify all this.
You know what's coming, right?
We got the call from the happy chaps in Underwriting, "You have been refused coverage because you have [yes HAVE] HCV."
I'm calmly documenting the fact that I do NOT have HCV, and fully expect that this will be accepted at some point in time. I also fully expect that it won't be easy, that it will require endless back and forth, that the clinic and the investigator [the hepatologist running the clinic] and others will be required to provide document, attest to facts that are established in documents already provided to the carrier, and testify, amplify, quantify, qualify, and perform unnatural acts until the carrier finally accepts what I laid out in the application.
The short story is that SVR means a lot to us who have lived with HCV and slogged through tx, but all the insurance carriers see is an opportunity to say, "You have been refused coverage because you have [yes HAVE] HCV."