Mr Kissyfur wrote:
Captain Caveman wrote:
Mr Kissyfur wrote:
Squirt wrote:
Isn't that kind of what NICE is meant to do? Weigh up the cost / benefit ratios and recommend whether to purchase a certain drug or not, and when and when not to use it?
That's exactly what they do. And then they get pilloried in the press for not allowing people to have £3,000,000,000 a day cancer treatments that extend their life by two days.*
*Numbers may be approximate.
Well, they're not doing it
very well are they, given the aforementioned size of big pharma profits. By the sounds of it, they just take the purchase price of a given drug as read, too, only comparing benefits vs. this 'cost'. Not exactly the brightest procurement strategy, given the 20-year patent monopoly scenario for newly patented, exclusively manfactured drugs.
You know there's an NHS pricing thingy, right? That limits the prices companies can charge? And that it isn't set by NICE?
Whether it's 'nice' or some other bloody useless, toothless governmental quango/talking shop/committee or other, I couldn't give a toss. All sementics as far as I'm concerned. The point that you and others seem to be missing is this: given the bloated profits of the pharmaceutical companies, even after all the massive 'overheads' are taken off their bottom line (the kind of 'overheads' that most normal businesses could only dream of), they're not doing a very good job then, are they?
Oh, and for the record, I am not, of course, saying that the NHS should only treat life threatening conditions, obviously. Just that it shouldn't necessarily be treating non life threatening conditions @ £1000/week (or more), using the latest designer drugs, where much cheaper (and perhaps less effective) remedies are available (indeed were the
only drugs available perhaps 2 or 3 years ago). If the drugs companies cannot sell for such exorbitant prices, they'd soon come down even without any formal regulatory framework. That's the law of the market - a very simple concept to understand and yet inconceivably, there's been precious little of that these last 13 years. It's why we are where we are in the first place; shit, it's only billions of pounds of all of our money that's at stake here, afterall.
A bit of business nowse would go a long, long way in the NHS, seems to me, as indeed elsewhere within the public sector.
A good piece in the Indy if anyone's interested:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 67257.htmlQuote:
Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies – not the health of humanity.
The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system – so the sick can live. Only then we can globalise the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: "It would be like patenting the sun."
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Beware of gavia articulata oculos...
Dr Lave wrote:
Of course, he's normally wrong but
interestingly wrong