UK rationed health care denies breast cancer treatment
One of the problems with single payer systems is there are no alternatives readily available to patients. This is where Democrats would like to take us. While they have at least one clown in the House who claims Republicans want sick people to die fast, in countries that have the system he wants it is the managers who are rationing the care that have that impact.A drug which can give women with advanced breast cancer extra weeks or months of life has been turned down by a government watchdog body for use in the NHS.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) says it proposes to reject Tyverb (lapatinib) in spite of changes in the rules brought in specifically to allow people at the end of their lives to have the chance of new and often expensive treatments.
Tyverb is the only drug licensed for women with advanced breast cancer whose tumours test positive for a protein called HER2 and for whom Herceptin, a Nice-approved drug, is no longer working. In much of the rest of Europe, Tyverb is then given, in combination with a standard chemotherapy drug called capecitabine.
Around 2,000 women in the UK could be eligible for the drug, which has the additional benefit of being taken in pill form, which means that women can stay at home and attempt to live normal lives.
Nice turned down Tyverb earlier this year, saying it was too expensive for the benefit to patients it offered, but the British manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline, appealed. GSK asked for the drug to be considered under the new rules for end-of-life treatments.
GSK has also offered a cost-sharing deal. It has launched a patient access scheme, already taken up by 26 NHS trusts. Under the arrangements, the company will pay for the first 12 weeks of treatment of any patient.
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That is ridiculous. As in the US, citizens of the UK have the option to purchase (often through their employers) private health insurance to supplement their national health care. But unlike the US, the UK provides *basic* health care for all its citizens.
ReplyDeleteAre you under the bizarre impression that women in the US with terminal breast cancer who don't have private health insurance (or worse, who are under-insured, or have been kicked off their health insurance after their diagnosis) are given the option of getting Tyverb? Where are our readily available alternatives?
I don't think the Republicans want sick people to die fast, any more than the Democrats do. I think the House and the Senate are afraid of losing their campaign funding from the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies, and so the posturing and chest-beating on both sides is pretty much just that... a lot of rather expensive hot air. We aren't going to get rational or affordable health care legislation until our health care system completely implodes.
Which will happen eventually. But I won't be around to see it. I can't help but wonder if my stage IV breast cancer might have been caught earlier, at a less deadly stage, if the manager rationing the care at my very expensive insurance company (I pay twice as much as my friend in the UK pays in taxes for the national health care) had been willing to pay for the PET/CT scan I requested several years ago.