Drugs may be denied on cost-cutting grounds
Posted on 09/25/2007 11:57:52 AM PDT by Stoat
More than half of the 900 GPs and hospital doctors who responded to the questionnaire in Doctor magazine said they had seen patients suffer due to the rationing of treatment.
Two thirds said they had been told not to prescribe certain drugs by their NHS trust, even though the results could be fatal.
The report also found that consultants often bounce patients back for a new GP referral to attract more funding, rather than refer them straight to a second consultant.
One GP, Dr Pradeep Sharma, described the health system as a "lottery" where a patient's survival could depend on their address.
Of those whose prescribing was rationed, 75% said it had been done on cost grounds.
Examples included specified branded statins, which are used to lower cholesterol, which 21% of respondents said they had been told not to prescribe, specified anti-obesity drugs (12%) and specified smoking cessation drugs (9%).
More than half of those surveyed thought provision of care on the NHS had to be limited, but wanted clarification about what could be provided by a tax-funded system.
Doctor magazine group editor Charles Creswell added: "Rationing in the NHS is inevitable, but the existing muddled system is putting lives at risk and provoking conflict between patients, doctors and NHS managers.
"We need a rationing process which is transparent, consistent, evidence-based and fair."
A Department of Health spokesman said: "Treatment in the NHS is delivered according to patients' clinical needs.
"Doctors and nurses make these clinical decisions with patients - not managers or politicians.
"The NHS has received an unprecedented funding boost in recent years, but finance is not endless and hard decisions will always have to be made about which treatments to provide."
Picture the efficiency of Amtrak with the warmth and charm of the DMV.
But it’s Free...
‘When controlled for murder and auto accidents, which Americans die from at a far greater rate than any other industrialized nation, we are the longest living.’
Are you sure? One seventh of 1% of the US population die on the roads every year, so if we add one seventh of 1% to your life expectancy, it makes virtually no difference. Same story with murders - 13,000 Americans murdered, less than a 20th of 1% of the population isn’t going to increase or decrease average life expectancy by much. There are several industrialised nations with higher murder and road death rates than the US.
I've got a crackpot theory about such statistics, so I might as well air it here.
The Brits/Scots/Irish are much skinnier than Americans. I could have counted the fat UKers I saw on one hand, I think. Americans on average have gained a lot of weight in the last couple of decades. Why?
My theory is because Americans drink much more liquid than Europeans. They drink a moderate amount of Guinness, but if you order a diet coke you're liable to get a glass of 8-10oz, with maybe two or three small ice cubes in it. And no automatic re-fill, you have to explicitly stop the waitress and order a new one.
Americans have been advised in the last few decades to drink lots of liquids, and surely in places like Phoenix it would be dangerous not to. Americans have been told to drink liquids, and it will quell their appetite and they'll eat less. But Big Gulps have grown to huge purportions, and the overweight numbers are only getting higher.
So my theory is that perhaps increasing your liquids will make you eat less, for awhile. But eventually it will expand your capacity to eat, and your capacity for an appetite will increase as well.
"Diet" coca cola is not "calorie free" if it makes you eat more chicken fried steak.
‘That said, give me Johns Hopkins, Stanford, or some other major US hospital if my life was on the line.’
Well, as Americans are generally less healthy than Brits your hospitals get more practice! :)
‘I’ve got a crackpot theory about such statistics, so I might as well air it here.’
Are you sure it’s not just because the average American portion is twice that of the UK? I’m 6’2” ex armed forces and when I’m in the US I see kids eating huge portions I can’t finish. To English eyes there seems to be a culture of excess in food in the US. I don’t know how anyone can finish those buckets of fizzy pop they serve.
I think Brits still have a lot of the puritan in them and see such large portions as self-indulgent. We tend to walk a lot more as well.
There's probably some chicken and egg thing going on here. I actually lost weight during the trip, and we ate three times a day, often all we could eat. The part of the meals that were most "european" were the liquid sizes, about half a normal American drink size.
I should experiment on myself with this. Drink Euro sized drinks, and see if I lose weight because my appetite goes away.
Not quite sure that that is true. I’ll skip the obligatory comment on the state of British dental care. ;>)
"We need a rationing process which is transparent, consistent, evidence-based and fair."The doctor will come in and say "I could cure you, but the government has decided that you should die instead. Please go home and stop fighting it."
The only way the government can keep the rationing system going is by making it as opaque as possible.
Russians who were denied "rights" which the commies had no intention of respecting would be wait in line in one office, then get shuffled off to another one in a different place or city, until they lost interest - or tumbled to the reality and became vocally cynical, when they would be shipped off to the gulag until they were quietly cynical. Or quietly dead.Nobody would want to trade places with the fabulously wealthy Queen Victoria, because the health care available in the Nineteenth Century was negligible compared to today's. She was depressed for the last 20 years of her life because her husband died - and nobody much dies of typhoid these days. But even so, people still die - so health care technology is obviously still woefully inadequate to the purpose.
Other needs such as food are of finite utility, but health care is in principle of unlimited secular utility. Therefore we can see that the free market will eventually make health care the predominant factor in the economy. Socialism, by contrast, promises to make health care cheap. Hillary will always talk about "quality" health care, but the reality of socialism is that cost can always be held down somehow (no matter how deleterious) - and convenience and quality are inevitably the first casualties.
Socialism destroys the freedom to use your own money to reward quality - then condemns those who don't provide better quality than they have any reason to do. Socialism is finally just criticism, condemnation, and complaint. Just like journalism. And people wonder why journalists are socialist-minded . . .
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