Buying cures versus renting health: Financing health care with consumer loans.
Authors | |
Keywords | |
Abstract | A crisis is building over the prices of new transformative therapies for cancer, hepatitis C virus infection, and rare diseases. The clinical imperative is to offer these therapies as broadly and rapidly as possible. We propose a practical way to increase drug affordability through health care loans (HCLs)-the equivalent of mortgages for large health care expenses. HCLs allow patients in both multipayer and single-payer markets to access a broader set of therapeutics, including expensive short-duration treatments that are curative. HCLs also link payment to clinical benefit and should help lower per-patient cost while incentivizing the development of transformative therapies rather than those that offer small incremental advances. Moreover, we propose the use of securitization-a well-known financial engineering method-to finance a large diversified pool of HCLs through both debt and equity. Numerical simulations suggest that securitization is viable for a wide range of economic environments and cost parameters, allowing a much broader patient population to access transformative therapies while also aligning the interests of patients, payers, and the pharmaceutical industry. |
Year of Publication | 2016
|
Journal | Sci Transl Med
|
Volume | 8
|
Issue | 327
|
Pages | 327ps6
|
Date Published | 2016 Feb 24
|
ISSN | 1946-6242
|
URL | |
DOI | 10.1126/scitranslmed.aad6913
|
PubMed ID | 26912902
|
Links |