A few days ago I wrote about the denial of state-of-the-art drugs to desperately ill British cancer patients. Treatments widely used in Europe and the U.S. are being withheld from patients who badly need them.
This disgraceful policy was justified by the NHS on the grounds that there simply wasn’t enough money to pay for the expensive treatments. Well, according to the London Times, this was a lie:
Hospitals and NHS managers were pressured into spending hundreds of millions of pounds before the start of the financial year to “hide” a £1 billion surplus.
That’s right. The health care bureaucrats of Great Britain were sitting on a gigantic surplus while refusing to pay for much needed care. Needless to say, patient advocacy groups are not amused:
Patient representatives have criticised NHS managers for underspending while patients were still being denied vital treatments.
This is government-run health care—-cruel and dishonest.
Comments 6
I hate to say it, but who cares what goes on in the nightmarish NHS? Why try to in any way improve the National Health Service?
Brits instead need to focus on joining and expanding their private heath insurance system.
Posted 27 May 2008 at 10:39 pm ¶So excellent fiscal management is now grounds for criticism? And all the money stays in the NHS anyway. This is a non-story as usual.
Posted 28 May 2008 at 3:03 am ¶Either the NHS exists to provide care or to make a profit. If it is such a good thing that they had a surplus, due to “excellent fiscal management,” why the effort to “hide” it?
I suppose it’s ok that all of the money stayed in the NHS, as long as you become ill near the end of the fiscal year, so it will be spent on your care as the managent demonstrates their skill by disposing of the surplus they were able to generate by sacrificing the health of others earlier in the year.
I suppose if you fail to make your house payments for 11 months, and finally pay your bank/lender/mortgage company in December for the year, you should be congratulated for excellent fiscal management.
Posted 28 May 2008 at 7:01 am ¶The NHS budget is about $220 billion and it is the world’s third largest employer. Two years ago it was running at a small deficit - now it has a small (relative to budget) surplus - about 1.5%. Much of this will be used to introduce new services while dual running with old ones for a period. And again, the funding of experimental cancer drugs is an issue that affects all healthcare markets. There is no unlimited pot anywhere in the world - in the US there are huge co-pays on many drugs now that insurance companies are moving to percent fees, and the pharma companies also have to set up charitable schemes that cover some. Many people in the US go without.
Eg:
‘Washington, DC — Increases in copayments for potentially life-saving medications can significantly increase the odds that older adults will take the drugs less often, and may even discontinue taking them, suggests a study that will be presented here today at the American Geriatrics Society’s 2008 Annual Scientific Meeting. The Society’s annual meeting, which runs from April 30 to May 4, is the premier conference on aging research.’
http://www.americangeriatrics.org/news/copay050108.shtml
Posted 28 May 2008 at 9:56 am ¶http://www.uclh.nhs.uk/Our+hospitals/Royal+London+Homoeopathic+Hospital.htm
^Doesn’t look like excellent fiscal management to me. It’s bad enough that people here spend their own money for this obviously fake treatment, but when millions of pounds of government money are involved. Well, that’s just awful.
I find it amusing that the NHS is so careful about approving new cancer drugs that might not work when they’re spending millions on treatments that CANNOT WORK.
Posted 03 Jun 2008 at 8:34 am ¶The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital is one of the world’s oldest and leading centres of a wide range of complementary therapies, many of which are also extensively offered and researched in the US. But even though its budget is tiny compared with mainstream NHS funding, I do agree that homeopathy has no place in public funding and in fact contracts for some services have been terminated recently. However, the Queen travels with 60 different homeopathic ‘medicines’ - and she’s as fit a fiddle and her mother lived until 102. Go figure.
Posted 04 Jun 2008 at 4:37 pm ¶Post a Comment