Expensive Medications And What They Say About The Price Of Human Life

by Dr. Brian McDonough

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- There is no doubt that certain medications are extremely expensive.

Many of these medications are usually new to the market, or are developed for so called orphan disease-conditions that impact relatively few people. But if you have an orphan disease it doesn't matter to you if few have it. You need the treatment. For many, insurance will not pay the bill. There might be another answer in the works.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and Harvard oncologist have a proposal to get highly effective but prohibitively expensive drugs into consumers' hands: Healthcare installment loans. The report is in a journal called Science Translational Medicine. In the article they compared drug loans to mortgages. This would allow patients to buy highly expensive items requiring a major up-front payment that they could not otherwise afford. This may work or perhaps it will cause people to bring up a very delicate issue: what is the price of a human life and the relationship between business and your health?