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What is the point in developing new medicines when the NHS will not allow patients to have anticancer drugs or chemotheraputic agents if they are "Too Expensive"?

That story was in the Daily Mail recently.

One has to sell a lot of pills just to pay for the patent and FDA hurdles. Some of these drugs are just not that easy or cheap to make, either.

Sure, as a consumer I am often enraged by the prices, but I did work in that industry myself, once, and saw the other side of it.

“What is the point in developing new medicines when the NHS will not allow patients to have anticancer drugs or chemotheraputic agents if they are “Too Expensive”?”

Bingo. Take away incentive, and you stifle innovation. Back in the USSR..

I am not enraged by the prices.Without those prices there would not be those drugs. We pay the stratospheric prices for NEW drugs because the rest of the world will not pay for the R&D. All Pharmacological R&D is aimed at the American market because it is the last market that will support it because it is still a relatively free market. If the rest of the world paid the patent prices for these drugs the price would not be so high for the patent period and more of these drugs would come on the market. My primary concern is antibiotics. If we stop developing new drugs then we have simply said that our level of medical advance is so far beyond historical norms that we can afford to stop here and say this is far enough.

Except for antibiotics. A new antibiotic begins to decline in effectiveness as soon as it is in use and R&D has to be continuous to replace each new antibiotic with a newer more effective one. Once there is no more R&D then in a generation we will be medically back to 1910 or so- you get sick you die. And it is not just that our little illnesses become big fatal ones- all hospitals will become deathtraps and operations will not be done except when necessary immediately to save the life of the patient(if the deciding bureaucrat determines the patient is worth more economically alive than dead) and mortality will be very high.