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Rationing body rejects ten drugs (allowed in Europe) that could have extended lives -
Up to 20,000 people have died needlessly early after being denied cancer drugs on the NHS, it was revealed yesterday. The rationing body NICE has failed to keep a promise to make more life-extending drugs available.
Treatments used widely in the U.S. and Europe have been rejected on grounds of cost-effectiveness, yet patients and their loved ones have seen the NHS waste astronomical sums. Last week it emerged that £21billion - a fifth of the entire annual budget - was spent on failed schemes to tackle inequality....
Four drugs which could have benefited 16,000 people have been turned down outright and a further six which could have helped 4,000 more have been provisionally rejected. Just five drugs have been accepted - benefiting 8,500 people - says a damning report by the Rarer Cancers Forum....
The RCF also says NICE works so slowly that it takes 21 months to decide on a drug, during which time many patients die. This is despite promises from NICE bosses to get the decision time down to six months by the end of this year....
NICE said last night: ...'Our End of Life Treatments protocol, introduced at the beginning of 2009, has already made it possible for very expensive cancer treatments to be recommended when our standard approach would have resulted in more cautious guidance.'
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Your "End of Life Treatments protocol"? That makes the families of those 20,000 people feel much better, I'm sure.
Couple this example of government ineptitude and rationing with this statement from Bart Stupak, and it paints a frightening picture:
What are Democratic leaders saying? “If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,” Stupak says.
“Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”
From August of last year:
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The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost.
And who will suffer the most when they RATION care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
We must step up and engage in this most crucial debate. Nationalizing our health care system is a point of no return for government interference in the lives of its citizens. If we go down this path, there will be no turning back.
Ronald Reagan once wrote, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Let’s stop and think and make our voices heard before it’s too late.
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Today:
As I wrote in my first post on this topic, human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion. Government health care will not reduce the cost of medical care; it will simply refuse to pay it. And who will get left behind when they have to ration care to save money?
Please ask yourself: who will be left behind? And who will decide – what kind of panel will decide – who receives the health care that government will obviously have to ration?
- Sarah Palin
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