Nurses for Reform Blog

It is interesting how during August when many people have their eye off the ball the realities of government policy are quietly revealed.  This story demonstrates that, despite its pre-election promises, David Cameron’s government are not committed to providing cancer drugs to those in desperate  need.

In fact as this article demonstrates the goal posts are being moved constantly, the budget for cancer drugs is being revised downwards and only a fraction of people with cancer will receive the life prolonging drugs that they need.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence known as NICE has yet again let down patients who desperately need medicines that will improve both quality and length of life.  This time it is women with the bone disease osteoporosis that have fallen foul of this Government agency’s dubious decision making process.

It is now becoming apparent to  British people, as it will to Americans as Comparative Effectiveness starts to withhold treatment, that NICE eventually turns NASTY – Not Available So Treat Yourself!

In 1948 the British Government promised the people of the UK that ALL Medical, Dental and Nursing Care would be free, yet this week the Government agency the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has decided that you will be left to die if your medical condition is considered to be too expensive to treat.

If this is not a stark enough warning that Government should not be involved in healthcare I don’t know what is.

Yet more evidence is coming to light that the NHS is not a service that is there to care for its customers – yes the NHS does have customers they are called tax payers!

A report in the daily mail today shows that NICE is not only rationing medicines for NHS patients by not approving them, it is stopping patients having from medicines that improve quality of life by not even assessing them for three years.

So much for the promise at the inception of the NHS that all medicines and care would be given from ‘cradle to grave’.  As far as I can see the NHS and other government agencies such as NICE seem now to be there for the sole purpose of making sure that very little is available and that the journey to the grave is very uncomfortable and much quicker than necessary.

Please do click on the link to the Daily Mail article and spend a little extra time reading the comments from people who have suffered at the hands of the NHS.  It makes for very uncomfortable reading and really makes you question how any civilised, developed country can continue with this system of healthcare.

While Dan Hannan understandably accused the NHS of being Marxian, for NFR he would have done better to point out that it is national socialist in character and practice.

For not only does it engender the worst kind of bogus nationalist and xenophobic – ‘best in the world’ – rhetoric under the guise of patriotism, but in constantly trying to impose a counter-productive egalitarianism (which inevitably leads to all kinds of post-code and political voice lotteries) it marginalises those it purports to look after such as the elderly, the mentally ill and the poor .

Today, there are hundreds of thousands of people on waiting lists, with tens of thousands more trying to get onto them. On average, professional and managerial types receive 40 per cent more resource per illness episode than those at the bottom of the social scale. Ten per cent of NHS patients pick up infections and illnesses during their hospital stays that they did not have prior to being admitted.

Forget Marxism. This is a system that engenders survival of the fittest and through NICE increasingly seeks to legitimate its eugenicist approach to human life.