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Depends exactly what the success rates are with it really. As I understand it there are still negotiations going on for the drug on a permanent basis, but the drug company will have to drop its price. $300k per year, per patient is all well and good but the success rates may not be good enough to warrant that. For eveyr new drug there has to be that discussion and that measuring: what benefits does/can it bring -v- cost of treatment.
In every health system, socialised or private such decisions are made. The difference is that in the socialised system, the decision is made based on that cost to benefit assessment, in order to maximise what can be done with limited resources. There is no profit consideration (or shouldn't be) and there is not a predisposition towards minimising access to treatment in order to maximise profits.
In both systems the wealthy can opt for treatment not covered by the health service or insurance company. In the socialised system the poorest is guaranteed medical care, though may not be guaranteed specific treatments if they have not yet met the NICE requirements and been incorporated into NHS provision. IN the private system the poorest are guaranteed only emergency care in the event of accident.
I have a couple of chronic illnesses for which I have received the necessary care and treatment my entire life without ever having to worry about anything more than the cost of prescription charges (fixed at £7.50 per item). My father would have been bankrupted by his cOPD, and my cousin's family probably would have spent ten years repaying the costs of patching him back up after his road accident.
It ain't perfect. Mistakes are made, poor decisions are made, hospitals are mismanaged. But no more so than in any other system. To point to the refusal of a specific treatment for a specific condition, which is still new, not wholly proven, and with the high cost of a new medicine as evidence of something fundamentally wrong with socialised medicine is disingenuous to my mind. Because you are not comparing like with like. You are comparing the experience of British socialised medicine with that available for insured Americans, which is only part of the picture. How many uninsured people will die at a significantly younger age because they have had inadequate health care? Sure, if they break their leg the hospital will set it for them. But if they have chronic lung disease, will the same emergency hospitals provide long term medication and therapy?
You're also comparing an unusual situation with the norm. Most medications that are proven and cost effective become available on the NHS within a year or so of going onto the market. You need an expensive liver transplant, or brain surgery, or lifelong medical treatment running into the hundreds of thousands of pounds, most of the time that will be covered, whether you are rich or poor, and whether you have a pre-existing condition or not.
And the drugs company will not drop prices without pressure.
The NHS is one of the most powerful drugs purchasers in the world. It has successfully driven down prices on all sorts of medicines. This process happens intermittently. New drug comes out, gets hailed as a wonderdrug, and ppeople who are desparately in need of something that works try to get it on the NHS. They get refused, either because the results are just not good enough, or because the drug company has set the price far too high for the benefits offered. This then gets into the popular pres as 'leaving people to die' and lots of people get upset.
The next stage is either that the drug turns out not to have been half as good as it was being touted as (like a recent cancer drug which for a cost of many thousands of pounds might have extended life for bowel cancer sufferers by 6 mths to a year), or the price drops. Drug companies desperately want their products to be put on the NHS approved list.
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