Health Care BS

Occasionally, the failures of socialized medicine are so egregious that they knock the scales from the eyes of the most ardent true believers. That’s what happened to Sarah Anderson, an English ophthalmologist, according to the Daily Mail:

I have spent my working life in the NHS. And for all its perceived failings, I have been proud of its fundamental role in our society - to provide equality of care for all. 

So, what caused her to see the light? Well, as is often the case with such people, she didn’t wake up until someone she loved was subjected to the “equality of care” that she has been so willing to foist on everyone else:

I never for a moment thought that a life could be decided by something as arbitrary as one’s address. Yet that is what has happened to my father. And it is only now, sitting on the side of the patient, that I have seen the injustice inherent in our system and the devastation it can cause.

In this case, the injustice involves the refusal of the local NHS trust to provide her father with a cutting edge cancer drug, Sutent, which is widely prescribed in Europe and in the U.S.  So, what’s the problem?

Well, despite the fantasies of left-leaning policy wonks who sing the praises of NICE, the British version of the FDA, the process for getting a new drug approved in Great Britain is a bloody scandal:

Although Sutent has been licensed in Europe since 2006, NICE has yet to decide whether it is effective enough to warrant the cost to the NHS. It is not due to pass judgment until next January …

Meanwhile, in a classic example of bureaucratic buck-passing, NICE is leaving it up to local NHS trusts to decide on Sutent’s use. Predictably, some PCTs have decided not to fund the drug. And people are dying:

Of the 3,100 patients a year who discover that they have advanced kidney cancer, fewer than 200 have succeeded in getting funding from their PCT.

This is government-run health care—-inefficient and cruel. Sadly, true believers like Anderson rarely face this reality until it affects them personally. Meanwhile, everyone else pays the price of their naiveté.