They are now available because the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) from this week has increased the amount of money the NHS can spend on a treatment in the hope of giving patients a longer and higher quality of life from £30,000 to £35,000 a year.
That’s per Qualy, per decent life year gained by the treatment. We are saved etc:
While NICE was established in 1999, the explicit range of £20,000–£30,000 became commonly recognized as the guiding threshold in the early 2000s.
£30k then is worth about £15k now. So, the amount the NHS is willing to pay to save us hsa halved in only a couple of decades. Isn’t a nationally planned – for our benefit of course – health service such a lovely thing?
It’s also a lovely retort to that argument that the reason the NHS becomes more expensive is because all these new expensive treatments keep arriving. But as the NHS doesn’t spend on all these lovely new and expensive treatments that cannot be the reason for the rising NHS bill, can it?
The purpose of the NHS is the survival of the NHS as it morphs from trying to diguise itslef as a health service to becoming a political party in its own right. I’m not sure that £35,000 covers chopping the tits off little girls or castrating little boys, but then every rule needs exceptions
There’s a decent argument that tit and cock chopping, and the lifelong medicalisation that results from “transitioning”, reduces that person’s Qualys and therefore should never be funded.
Probably wrong. The biggest factor in lifetime medical cost is duration.
Smoking tobacco saves medical cost because smokers live shorter lives.
Chopadicktomy will shorten the life of the recipient. Though it could be argued they are so screwed up in the head, they will live a short life with or without the surgery.
You misunderstand a Qualy. It means Quality Adjusted Life Year, a “healthy” year of life resulting from a medical intervention that costs up to £30,000 per expected Qualy, not simply an extra year of life.
Chopadicktomy and pro-tit medicalisation inevitably reduce the physical health of the recipient’s remaining lifespan. The whole process is anti-Qualy.
US doesn’t use the barbaric QALY bullshit. If you need treatment, you get it.
NHS is jerks, insisting on picking up the tab for health care, then complaining about the cost.
If you can afford treatment, you get it. FTFY
The US has the only health system that’s worse on most counts than the NHS. That’s why when we suggest changes in the UK, the response is “So you must want a US-style healthcare system, then.” No, I’d like a French-style system, or a German-style, or a Dutch-style, or a Swedish-style, or …
NHS – Excellence? Oxymoron.
Maybe it’s just indexed to median wage/income, with a bit of a lag?
If so, it’d be fairly straightforward to determine the number of life years required to recover the cost, etc, etc.
Taking of the NHS, what’s this utter madness with offering resident doctors specialist training places if they don’t strike and accept a deal?
Either the NHS needs those specialists to treat future patients or it doesn’t. Using the future treatment of patients as a bargaining chip in a current dispute should be a capital offence.
“NICE” decides how much money can be spent on a patient? Maybe the mandarins creating this institution took inspiration from C.S. Lewis’ “That Hideous Strength” (The 3rd book of the “space trilogy”): It is a sinister, technocratic antagonist organization in this book. In the book, N.I.C.E. aims to control human life, planning to sterilize the population, practice selective breeding, and eventually replace organic life with chemical-based “humans”…
Fiscal drag is a bitch. However, the QALY is a concept of vast benefit to the NHS and its long suffering patients. Because the NHS buys QALYs it can negotiate hard with the drug companies. “Oi – Pfizer, your super duper new heart disease drug is too expensive per QALY, We can get twice as many cancer QALYs from Roche for the same cost.Cut your price or lose the deal.By the way – do you do any cheap painkillers for the heart disease patients?”