I'm a little late with this, but yesterday the FT published an analysis piece that delved a little more deeply into the subject covered this post:the joys of socialized medicine and cancer treatment.

{...}The ethical issue of whether patients seeking some private treatment should be excluded from the NHS is only part of a much broader global debate on the rising cost of medicines. It has been brought to a head by a new generation of cancer drugs that typically cost £30,000-£70,000 a year per patient. Concern over the rising total bill to the NHS prompted government negotiations that resulted in a 5 per cent average cut in medicine prices last week in a new contract with the pharmaceutical industry.

Around the world, escalating prices and expanding use are creating similar tensions. “Five years ago, the system worked, but now public health watchdogs are increasingly withholding treatment,” says Jonathan Anscombe, joint head of the European health practice at A.T. Kearney, the management consultancy.

Patients are being squeezed between the opposing forces of a state increasingly scrutinising whether new medicines are both cost- and clinically effective, and drug companies that resist lowering prices. Cuts may jeopardise the delicate financial balance that allows new treatments to be developed, the industry argues.

Options for reform include efforts by manufacturers to hold prices down and by regulators and reimbursement bodies to modify the criteria they use – and the costs they impose on drug development in the process. Patients, even in countries used to universal health coverage, may also have to start assuming a growing share of the costs directly

{...}One-third of people in the industrialised world develop one form or another of cancer. Desperate patients – and their doctors – are keen to try anything that may work. But Harpal Kumar, head of Cancer Research, the UK-based charity, cautions that most medicines remain blunt instruments. “The vast majority of cancer patients are cured by surgery and radiotherapy, not by drugs,” he says. “Most of the drugs are not saving lives but extending them by a small number of months.” His view is shared by Michael Rawlins, chairman of the National Institute for Clinical Health and Excellence (Nice), which advises the NHS on whether it should reimburse new medicines.

Nice has recommended that the NHS should not pay for six different cancer drugs in recent months. Two were rejected for lack of proven clinical effectiveness and the rest because, despite some demonstrable benefit, they were judged too expensive and would have been given at the expense of cheaper or more effective treatments for other patients.

“I think the drug companies are really going to have to take a hard look at the value of their products and price them accordingly,” says Prof Rawlins. “If there is a small benefit, they cannot charge premium prices. Traditionally they charged what they thought the market would bear. But we can only afford to pay when the price for innovation is in proportion to what it delivers.”{...} Oh, yeah. It gets better. Go and read the whole thing. But if you can't be bothered, the message seems to be, "Tough shit if you've paid taxes all your life and expected free cradle-to-grave health care. You're probably not going to get it. The meanie pharmaceuticals won't come down on the cost of drugs, and we're not going to pay their price, so you're pretty much SOL. Sorry, but it's not our fault."

I ask again: Why do some people want to inflict socialized health care on us? You pay through the roof for lowest common denominator health care, and, then, because the government decides it's going to break its "social contracts," you're going to have to pay some more? No thank you.

Methinks some people would be begging for a privatized health insurance system, should we wind up going that route.

Or at least they will be when it's their life that's on the line.

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