WARREN — A Maine State Prison inmate is leading a class action lawsuit against the Maine Department of Corrections (DOC) claiming it refused to treat hundreds of inmates diagnosed with the hepatitis C virus (HCV).

The attorney working on behalf of inmate Mathiew Loisel, who is leading the suit and has been incarcerated at the Maine State Prison (MSP) since 2012, filed the class action lawsuit in federal court June 26.    

Loisel has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Also named as defendants in the lawsuit besides the DOC are Wellpath, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, which contracts with the DOC to provide medical care to prisoners at the MSP and other Maine correctional facilities; Robert Clinton, M.D., Medical Director for Wellpath; Richard Liberty, a nurse practitioner employed by Wellpath at the MSP; Randall Liberty, the Commissioner of the DOC; and Matthew Magnusson, Warden at the MSP.

The complaint alleges that the state refused to treat hundreds of inmates diagnosed with chronic HCV until the disease has progressed to the point where they have permanent liver damage.

According to the lawsuit, Maine DOC records indicated that, as of October 2017, there were 580 inmates in custody who were infected with HCV, and only three of them were receiving treatment.

“This is a grave public health issue,” said Loisel’s attorney Miriam Johnson, of Berman and Simmons law firm in Lewiston, in a news release. “The policy of denying appropriate medical treatment to prisoners with chronic HCV is not only cruel and unconstitutional; it also facilitates the spread of a dangerous and costly epidemic.

Chronic HCV is a highly communicable and progressive disease that, if left untreated, scars the liver and can cause, among other things, cancer, intense pain, and death, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit further claims that the standard of care for chronic HCV is an 8-12 week course of daily medications known as direct-acting antivirals (DAA). A course of DAAs has few side effects and achieves a cure in more than 90 percent of cases. 

“The policy or protocol for all prisoners in custody of the Maine DOC requires a patient sustain a certain level of liver damage before being treated,” according to the claim.   

Since 2014, Loisel has suffered from chronic HCV and has suffered from chronic fatigue, abdominal pain, and acid reflux, the complaint said.

In January 2018, Loisel said he was allegedly told “that, in sum and substance, the costs of these drugs is just too high” and that [defendants] “cannot possibly treat everybody.”

The lawsuit is questioning whether the defendants’ policy regarding treatment of chronic HCV of prisoners violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States and the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

“This policy was inherited by the current administration,” said Johnson in a news release. “We are hopeful that the new administration will work with us to put new policies into place to resolve this issue.”

Besides Johnson, lead attorneys in the lawsuit are Taylor Asen of Berman & Simmons in Lewiston and Peter Mancuso and Andrew Schmidt of Andrew Schmidt Law, PLLC, in Portland.

Sarah Shepherd can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com