Rationing by the NHS

[buster2209]

This is the reality of the British National Health Service (NHS).

You DON'T want the Government to run health care!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8367614.stm

Liver cancer drug 'too expensive'

A drug that can prolong the lives of patients with advanced liver cancer has been rejected for use in the NHS in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) said the cost of Nexavar - about £3,000 a month - was "simply too high".

But Macmillan Cancer Support said the decision was "a scandal".

More than 3,000 people are diagnosed with liver cancer every year in the UK and their prognosis is generally poor.

Only about 20% of patients are alive one year after diagnosis, dropping to just 5% after five years.

'Disappointed'

Campaigner Kate Spall, who won the right to have two months of treatment for her mother, Pamela Northcott, in 2007, said it had prolonged her life by four-and-a-half "precious" months.

It had allowed her 58-year-old mother, from Dyserth in Denbighshire, "closure" and "peace", she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"The problem in Mum's case is it took a year for me to fight for the treatment, so we'll never know how well she could have done," she said.

We had extra time, which was very precious to us all, her symptoms were helped greatly. And, more importantly, for Mum it was a case of getting some closure and peace.

"The psychological feeling when a group of people decide that you cannot have a treatment that can help you is really devastating."

Cancer Research UK's chief clinician Peter Johnson said the decision was "enormously frustrating" because there was no doubt about the drug's effectiveness.

He said: "There's no alternative treatment and there are no other places for people to go. It is expensive, but the only issue is cost and the number of patients affected are quite few - there's probably only six or seven hundred patients a year."

Nexavar - also known as sorafenib - had already been rejected in Scotland, despite studies showing it could extend the life of a liver cancer patient by up to six months.

'Devastating disease'

The Scottish Medicines Consortium ruled that "the manufacturer's justification of the treatment's cost in relation to its benefit was not sufficient to gain acceptance".

Andrew Dillon, chief executive of NICE, agreed: "The price being asked by [the manufacturer] Bayer is simply too high to justify using NHS money which could be spent on better value cancer treatments."

And the group's clinical and public health director, Peter Littlejohns, added the drug was considered "just too expensive" by its advisory committees.

Nexavar is routinely offered to cancer patients elsewhere in the world, and Mike Hobday, head of campaigns at Macmillan Cancer Support, said he was "extremely disappointed" at NICE's decision.

"It is a scandal that the only licensed drug proven to significantly prolong the lives of people with this devastating disease has been rejected, leaving them with no treatment options," he said.

Alison Rogers, chief executive of the British Liver Trust, said: "The decision to reject a treatment for advanced liver cancer is a huge blow for patients.

"This is a treatment to extend life for people where all other options have run out.

"It is particularly hard for people with liver cancer given that treatments for many other advanced cancers have been given the green light by NICE.

"People with liver disease often face stigma and discrimination and sadly this decision feels like a further disadvantage to them."

Earlier this year, a government review of end-of-life treatment said NICE should give extra weight to drugs that could extend a patient's life.

The Department of Health said NICE was not ignoring that recommendation, but the NHS could not just pay for any drug at any cost.

Please not the irony of the organisation that decides what treatments and drugs people can have is called NICE.

[Paradigm]

Gee...and now you can start seeing why the Obama administration started changing policies with breast cancer screenings. Preemptive rationing. It's here now.

[buster2209]

Gee...and now you can start seeing why the Obama administration started changing policies with breast cancer screenings. Preemptive rationing. It's here now.

Take a not of what Tony Blair did to Britain since 1997 and his successor, the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown is doing. Obama and Blair come from the same school of politics so seeing what has happened to Britain is a good indicator to what Obama intends for the US.

[cgbudde]

Typical gnt thinking. You get sick, you are useless, so let them die.

[eXceLon]

Gee...and now you can start seeing why the Obama administration started changing policies with breast cancer screenings.

Except they haven't. It was a research commission, that released a recommendation based on their study of the available data. That's it. There's nothing legally binding about it.

Regarding the thing about the NHS, I don't really know enough about the issue to comment. The Wikipedia article on Nexavar suggests that the drug does not statistically increase the chance of survival, so at best it seems like this drug may let you live for another month or two.

At any rate, anyone who has taken a basic economics course know that all systems have some form of rationing. The capitalist system merely uses supply and demand and the pricing mechanism to efficiently allocate limited resources. As long as there is not an infinite amount of health care, that means there will be some form of health care rationing. The rationing in our system is simply that if you're too poor to have health insurance, you just don't get health care. I don't know if it can really be argued to be a superior system.

[Paradigm]

Except they haven't. It was a research commission, that released a recommendation based on their study of the available data. That's it.

Well, Barack Obama himself didn't do the study...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...82&ft=1&f=1003

(yes, NPR)

The new guidelines, issued this week by an independent, government-funded task force, call for later and less frequent mammograms for most women. Republicans are suggesting that the guidelines reinforce their nightmare scenario about health care rationing under President Obama's proposed overhaul.

*snip*

The Democrats' health care bills all create a marketplace or exchange where people could go to buy health insurance. The government would rely on independent task forces — including the one that issued the breast cancer screening recommendations — to help determine which prevention benefits insurers in the exchange would have to offer.

But, to be fair, NPR saves the day:

To counter these arguments, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a statement saying that women should keep doing what they've been doing for years.

...but would you trust a government official to your health?:

Sebelius pointed out that it is the secretary of health and human services — not the advisory panels — who would be the final arbiter of what is and is not covered.

*cough* rationing *cough*

So, Sebelius is contradicting the Democrat bill as mentioned above. Gee...who to believe?

[eXceLon]

Right now I trust my health to an insurance company bureaucrat.