Patients have long paid healthcare bills by taking out a loan or using their credit card, but new methods of payment may be needed to cover the rising cost of certain medical treatments.
With hepatitis C treatments that are $1,000 a pill, cancer drugs priced at $100,000 annually and gene therapy at almost $1 million per treatment, MIT professor Andrew Lo and David Weinstock, MD, at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, are pushing to create a long-term healthcare loan, according to a WBUR report.
"The basic idea is for individual patients to have access to healthcare loans, not unlike a mortgage or auto loan or student loan," Mr. Lo told WBUR. Patients would "borrow from a loan company to pay for these extremely expensive therapies and amortize the payments over a period of time, say five to 10 years."
Patients would be able to use these loans for drugs or treatment that would cure a disease or improve the patient's health over the length of the loan, according to the report. However, they would not use the loans for drugs that extend life for only a few months, WBUR notes.
In addition to patient loans, Mr. Lo and Dr. Weinstock, as part of their longer-term payment model for costly medicine, are proposing a loan insurers would take out for individual patients.
Some consumer advocates question the need for such loans, claiming that is what health insurance is for, while some insurers have warned that they can't take on rising pharmaceutical costs indefinitely, according to the report.
Dr. Weinstock told WBUR he sees the loans as providing a boost for drug developers who target rare diseases because payment for discoveries that work would be assured, according to the report.
Mr. Lo and Dr. Weinstock plan to meet with investors, insurers, pharmaceutical reps and others later this year.
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