Monday, Nov 17, 2008
Instead Brown prefers to buy banks
bloomberg: Cancer Patients Lose Chance of Longer Life as U.K. Curbs Costs
``There is a view that all treatments should be available. Unfortunately, that's not possible,'' said Peter Littlejohns, NICE's clinical and public health director. ``There is a limited pot of money.''
Posted by mark @ 10:08 AM (353 views) Add Comment
11 Comments
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1. planning4acrash said...
This is exactly what the IMF requires of Third World Countries when they seek for assistance. More money to pay debt fiat, less on services. Has Brown already signed away our lives?
2. planning4acrash said...
This is exactly what the IMF requires of Third World Countries when they seek for assistance. More money to pay debt fiat, less on services. Has Brown already signed away our lives?
3. renting2 said...
``There is a limited pot of money.'' Only limited by who and what you know. TB and then GB said they were gonna build a third way, but as always the vulnerable suffer while the rich and powerful look after themselves. Where commitment is concerned, life = 0%, fiat money supply = 100%.
4. Ssss said...
There are too many old people.
5. Little Professor said...
As a doctor, it gets increasingly frustrating when you read stories like these. The NHS is (contrary to perceptions) very underfunded compared to other developed nations' healthcare systems. But we as a nation aren't prepared to increase what we spend on it.
No party has ever been elected by promising to raise taxes - people don't want to spend the money on the NHS, but then moan and bitch about the fact that it can't afford to spend £30,000 a year on the latest and greatest drug for one patient just so we can prolong their life by a couple of days.
Either pay up or shut up.
6. Orcusmaximus said...
As a generalisation, the longer you live, the more it costs to keep you alive. At some point, NICE/NHS has to say no, and anyone who says otherwise needs to wake up.
One injustice I'd like to see removed would be that people who pay for private treatment (eg because the drugs they need are not available on the NHS) are struck off from receiving NHS care. How can you penalise people for doing what they can to stay alive?
7. shipbuilder said...
Paying for the NHS wholly by taxes is inefficient and means that the NHS will always be subject to underfunding. This is why free prescriptions were a nonsense - sadly, unless some proportion of care is payed for directly, people start to take the p*ss.
8. shipbuilder said...
Part our selfish and individualistic view of life these days is that we are entitled to everything, including for our lives to be extended indefinitely. Our health system and society needs to focus on maximising our quality of life, rather than our longevity. The amount of funding given to cancer research as opposed to, say, alzheimers, is clearly an imbalance. More money for drug companies, I guess.
9. d'oh said...
Little Prof - Yes, the NHS is underfunded, however I think part of the problem is that anyone who has had anything to do with the NHS sees the obscene waste and misuse of resources, together with an inefficiency that is breathtaking to behold. Until that is sorted, I think it would be hard to convince me to pay more tax for the institution.
The last time I visited a hospital was with my partner, and without us being very observant she would have been given an overdose of paracetamol! This is basic stuff, and patients shouldn't have to have someone watching the doctors and nurses like a hawk.
I can remember a few years back, the number of managers in the NHS finally exceeded the number of hospital beds. No reasonable system can possibly need that many managers. FFS, sack them all and hire a doctor for each bed and let him/her fill in the paperwork during his/her spare time! (Okay, nothing is that simple, but you get the point...)
Outsourcing of cleaning has been an absolute disaster. it is no wonder the UK is a superbug capital of Europe. What disturbs me is that I know three people who have gone into hospital for small operations and not come out due to some superbug or the other. I'm not the most social of creatures, so being able to think of three people who I have had contact with who have been prematurely removed from this planet due to not wanting to pay cleaners a decent wage or pension, whilst upper management bloats is very worrying. I won't even tell you about the state of a birthing pool that has been related to me through Ms D'oh from one of her friends.
I suspect that what has happened in the NHS is something akin to what I observed happen in the universities over the past 20 years - the growth of the culture of managerialism and all its inefficiencies.
This is not to say that there aren't a lot of great people working in the NHS, just that in every experience I have had with the institution there has been just as many lazy/stupid/dangerous people.
10. little professor said...
D'oh - you're completely right about the proliferation of managers, and the outsourcing of cleaning services to for-profit companies being an absolute disaster
11. paranoia blue said...
Shipbuilder @ 8 – Could not agree more!