Hot Air brings us This Story
Campaigners have condemned a decision to turn down a bowel cancer drug for use on the NHS in England and Wales.
The health watchdog NICE says the cost of avastin – at about £21,000 per patient – does not justify its benefits.
My company does a lot of cancer work, and Avastin is one of the market leaders for multiple cancer types. “Free” healthcare isn’t shit if it closes doors to medical treatment for you.
What a load of crock! That drug did not add “six weeks” to my mother’s life – it added YEARS (those campaigners have it right). After we paid tens of thousands of dollars for it.
The amount of people we knew through the hospital whom couldn’t afford it and therefore died within months was disgusting.
It’s sad that other countries are following the same route as Australia. 🙁
I was thinking about your mother when I read that.
And sad indeed, unless we do something this is in the cards for us yanks as well.
Basically, I don’t mind a national health care system putting caps on treatment… IF it is possible to save one’s pennies and get an umbrella/catastrophic heath care policy. That’s a safety net. If you can’t save up to – at your personal discretion – go beyond it, it’s a prison.
What better position for authoritarian government officials than prison wardens?
Geez…
I didn’t know you could put a price on someone’s life. (Life as more than just a vegetable on machines at that too…)
There are SUCH gigantic discrepancies in good health care vs poor health care itself, that it makes me particularly nervous about what the future holds. Yeah, when I started to come down with this random gut thing I ended up going from Urgent Care to the ER because Urgent Care basically patted me on the head and told me to deal with my symptoms even when the pain got worse a day later. Even with insurance I know I’ll end up paying out the nose, but what if it was all like Urgent Care and ends up limiting things. They were not willing to refer me to get a CT scan for another week. My abdomen had been hurting for going on three weeks and I had a fever on and off. The only reason they did surgery was due to the CT that the ER follow up doctor ordered that same week! After seeing the results both the radiologist and the doctor wanted a surgeon’s opinion ASAP, which lead to surgery on the next day. The Urgent Care people basically wanted me to sit around with what actually is considered a life threatening issue!
Yes, in the middle of all of that frustration and anger illustrated above there is a point. One size fits all style health care is a bad idea. I think it will lead to poor diagnosis, a lack (or at LEAST serious delay) of available important tests, and over all higher costs in spite of insurance. Call me paranoid, I don’t care. After this particular foray in the medical and insurance fields it all sucks no matter what.