The UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or NICE, is about to lose its power to reject new meds for use on the National Health Service plan. Instead, NICE will give advice about which drugs are deemed effective, but will no longer decide whether patients should be given treatments their doctor recommends. Those decisions will now be made by doctors.
NICE, which has often been reviled for some of its denials, currently assesses drugs and whether they are sufficiently cost effective to be made available through the NHS. In the UK, drug prices are governed by the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme, which allows drugmakers to set prices when meds are launched, but this arrangement expires in 2013. The government plans to introduce 'value-based pricing,' in which fees are negotiated based on scientific assessments of clinical value. The existing limit on the cost of new drugs, by the way, is about $34,000.
Patient groups cheered the move. The watchdog agency has been blamed for the UK’s low rates of cancer survival - about 20,000 patients die unnecessarily early each year because of NICE decisions. "Having a body that can say 'no' to pharmaceutical companies has been crucial in driving the price of drugs down, so that the NHS can afford to support patients more often," Mike Hobday of Macmillan Cancer Support, tells the BBC. "But NICE has too often misread the public mood in rejecting clinically effective drugs for rare cancers."
It is not yet clear how value-based pricing would be implemented. Karl Claxton,a York University health economist, tells Nature that once an independent body has decided on value, drugmakers could be presented with options. For instance, if a high price is chosen, the drug would be limited to a restricted groups of patients, while a lower price could mean the drug is more widely available.
The implications may include drugmakers more closely examining their pipelines for meds that are likely to prove their worth and generate sufficient returns. Meanwhile, Richard Barker, director general of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, says if the UK is perceived as unfriendly to innovation, drugmakers could move funding for research elsewhere. "Investment decisions are made by people — they look to invest in markets where they are welcome," he says.
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When Obamacare is fully implemented, it will work similarly to NICE, but on a more personalized level. Here're how it will work: You are in your doctor's office, and he/she has made your diagnosis. Before a treatment pllan can be implemented, the doctor will press an app on his/her smartphone, which will connect the doctor to a governmental bureaucrat, who will tell the doctor which treatment to select. If the doctor deviates from the G-man's recommendation, that will result in a $100,000 fine. After the second deviation, the doctor will go to prison.
Welccome to the future.
And the treatment will always be the newest most expensive new treatments from Pharma.
Why do you think Pharma were such big funders of Obama's campaign.
There are lies, damned lies, and *insider* lunatics spewing total sewage. The truth: Your Health Insurance Company decides what treatments you receive, either in the US or in the UK, just the same. The difference: In the UK, the NHS is your (one size fits all) Ins Co. decision-taker, most of the time (some people also have private health insurance). In the US, your *friendly* local Ins Co. decides on your treatment, which depends mostly on what you can afford, i.e. how much you pay in premiums.