NICE To Be Stripped Of Powers To Make Drug Decisions For NHS.
The Daily Mail (UK) (11/1, Martin) reports, "The scandal of patients being denied drugs just because the NHS rationing body decides they are too expensive will end, ministers have declared." The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence "will be stripped of its powers to ban drugs on the Health Service," and "the current arbitrary limit on the cost of new drugs -- around £30,000 per year of extended high-quality life -- will be scrapped from 2014." The Department of Health also "says that NICE would no longer be 'acting as an arbiter on the availability of drugs', with GPs instead deciding what the NHS could afford."
NICE is the UK governmental equivalent of HHS/Medicare which heretofore has had the authority to ban drugs and other therapies not because they are ineffective or unsafe, but because the NICE calculations indicate that for the UK as a whole, the drugs are not economic.... Like in the US, the UK has one agency (MHRA) that approves drugs as "Safe & Effective", the equivalent of our FDA, and then NICE which determines which of the approved drugs can be used by doctors and hospitals.
This same approach is embedded within Obamacare - It's notihing short of rationing and strips the key decision on medical care away from the Physician & Patient and gives it to a bunch of .gov bureaucrats.
It's awfully ironic that supporters of Obamacare are using this UK as a model just as the UK is dismantling key elements of their troubled system.
While overturning Obamacare would take veto proof majoities in both House & Sentate (Unrealistic) - we can vote for the candidates that will defund the project and let it die on the vinew. SO Get Out & Vote !