The Relevance Of Medical Prescription Loans

Today, consumers take out loans to purchase cars, pay their college education and buy houses. But what if one could take out a loan for expensive medicines? This is an idea that has recently gained traction among the financial and medical community. It was recently floated by a group of health economists from Boston in the Science Translational Medicine journal. Medical prescription loans could allow people to cope with costly healthcare.

The need for these loans is best explained by hepatitis C treatments and medications. Hepatitis C drugs are not cheap. They range between $54,600 and $94,500 for a treatment course. This is dependent on the drugs taken and the regimen required. Despite these high costs, these medicines are facing high demand because they have a 90 percent success rate.

The Shortcomings of Health Insurance
These loans could be effective in helping people get expensive drugs that they could otherwise not afford. While many may argue that health insurance already caters for these shortcomings in the medical industry, it is important to understand that health covers are usually not comprehensive enough.

In addition, health insurance predominantly deals with preventive medicine as opposed to treatment. This means that many people with health covers are usually left to cover expensive drug costs after receiving treatment. Additionally, the high cost of drugs is pushing many insurance companies away from offering this coverage.

Loan Prospects
Lenders like to assess the creditworthiness of loan applicants and their overall health. This allows them to determine if the applicant is healthy enough to live longer and clear their loan. Medical prescription loans would work only if everybody involved was assured favorable outcomes.

This means that borrowers need to be assured that the drugs they buy are effective. If the drugs do not work, then they should be exempted from repaying the loan. This would act as an incentive for pharmaceutical companies to improve their drugs. When borrowers take out loans to purchase drugs, the demand increases encouraging pharmaceutical companies to increase their production.

Potential Challenges Facing These Loans
Some illnesses are not easily vanquished. This could lead to payment defaults if patients do not get better, or if they die before meeting their loan obligations. This underscores the challenge that lenders face during their credit risk evaluation. If you want more info, then visit this webpage.

To ease risk of default on lenders, the government would have to agree to guarantee healthcare loans. This would also ease the pharmaceutical industry's pricing pressure. However, an increase in demand could cause pharmaceutical companies to increase their prices making healthcare loans counterproductive.

The financial and banking community could start to bundle loans together and then resell them -- this is referred to as securitization. Unfortunately, this is the same financial maneuver that caused the 2007/2008 depression.

Medical prescription drugs have the potential to help many people in need of large sums of cash for purchasing prescription drugs. Despite the challenges facing this type of loan, success is achievable if all concerned stakeholders came together to iron out the kinks.  This would make these loan facilities beneficial to all parties.