Speaking to the American Medical Association last month, President Obama waxed enthusiastic about countries that "spend less" than the U.S. on health care. He's right that many countries do, but what he doesn't want to explain is how they ration care to do it.
Take the United Kingdom, which is often praised for spending as little as half as much per capita on health care as the U.S. Credit for this cost containment goes in large part to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or NICE. Americans should understand how NICE works because under ObamaCare it will eventually be coming to a hospital near you.
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Associated Press
President Barack Obama speaks about health care during a town hall meeting at Northern Virginia Community College last Wednesday.
The British officials who established NICE in the late 1990s pitched it as a body that would ensure that the government-run National Health System used "best practices" in medicine. As the Guardian reported in 1998: "Health ministers are setting up [NICE], designed to ensure that every treatment, operation, or medicine used is the proven best. It will root out under-performing doctors and useless treatments, spreading best practices everywhere."
What NICE has become in practice is a rationing board. As health costs have exploded in Britain as in most developed countries, NICE has become the heavy that reduces spending by limiting the treatments that 61 million citizens are allowed to receive through the NHS. For example:
In March, NICE ruled against the use of two drugs, Lapatinib and Sutent, that prolong the life of those with certain forms of breast and stomach cancer. This followed on a 2008 ruling against drugs -- including Sutent, which costs about $50,000 -- that would help terminally ill kidney-cancer patients. After last year's ruling, Peter Littlejohns, NICE's clinical and public health director, noted that "there is a limited pot of money," that the drugs were of "marginal benefit at quite often an extreme cost," and the money might be better spent elsewhere.
GO HERE to read more from the Wall Sttreet Journal.
Rarely does a post strike a nerve in me like this one,and this is why:
ReplyDeleteMy late Mother had a very rare and aggressive stomach cancer (gastrointestinal stroma,or GIST) and Sutent is one of the few drugs that in testing have proven to shrink these GIST tumors.Sutent was approved by the FDA in early 2006 and my Mother was able to take it daily for a couple of months but sadly she succumbed to an infection before it had the chance to work for her.Whether it would have given her a few months,we will never know,but at least it was available to her.
Rationed government healthcare would not provide this option for GIST patients and thats enough to seal my opinion on Obamacare once and for all.
The current healthcare system is in shambles and needs to be fixed,but at what cost? To deny drugs that are proven to be the ONLY possible cure for a fatal disease is to give a death sentence.
If Obama wishes to compare America's cost to that of the U.K., how about comparing his pay package and perks to that of the prime minister or congress to the parliment.
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