Britain’s National Health Service is preparing to allow its loyal subjects to pay for some top-up drugs.
“Topping off” is when a patient pays for drugs that the NHS will not provide because NICE (The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) has determined that a given medicine’s “cost-effectiveness” isn’t up to snuff.
Key point – the government is getting ready to allow private citizens to spend their own money on healthcare.
According to an article in the Times of London, opponents of this reform feel it will “spell the end of the National Health Service.”
Further reforms are planned to the system under which local NHS committees decide which patients are exceptional cases and can receive drugs not yet approved by NICE.
If you are not “exceptional,” please take two steps forward … over the cliff.
Ministers were forced to review the ban after an outcry over the death in March of Linda O’Boyle, a grandmother who was denied free NHS treatment after buying a drug to treat her bowel cancer.
According to some at the NHS, patients must be made to understand what might happen if they ran out of cash before finishing their treatment.
Indeed. But what about never getting a chance at treatment in the first place?
Attention must be paid -- particularly by those who deem "health care like in England," as the "universal" solution to health care reform in the United States.
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