Expensive drugs and healthcare? Rationing in two nations
The well-worn notion that patients in the United States have unfettered access to the most expensive cancer drugs while the United Kingdom’s nationalized health care system regularly denies access to some high-cost treatments needs rethinking…
Critics of the U.K. system say care there is rationed — that patients are denied some expensive therapies so that better health care can be provided to the nation as a whole. Critics of the U.S. system say care is rationed here, too — that only those with the very best insurance and those who can afford sky-high out-of-pocket expenses have meaningful access to any and all high-priced therapies, especially at the end of life.
The authors found that with regard to very expensive cancer drugs, both characterizations are largely correct. “The issue is not whether rationing is a good thing or a bad thing,” Doctor Ruth Faden says. “The issue is what we should do about extraordinarily expensive treatments, some of which do very little to improve how well or how long people live.” At the same time, she adds, “there is no ethically defensible reason why some Americans have access to expensive cancer drugs and some do not.”
“Policy makers and our society now need to do the hard work of developing a reasoned, evidence-based system of using health care resources wisely, and the first step is to engage in an honest and transparent conversation about the values that should guide these decisions, a conversation that is informed by facts, not politics,” she says.
RTFA. Doctor Faden goes into the details.
The fact remains, unless you have the bucks – here in the States – you are screwed.
