The NHS is becoming increasingly underfunded, now meaning that cutting edge treatments for cancer and dementia could in the future be denied to patients.
New treatments are in their late stages of trials for dementia and cancer and will potentially be getting reviewed by the National Institute of Health Care and Excellence (NICE). However, if they are approved by NICE, they will now be the subject of affordability reviews by healthcare chiefs.
Provided that they are approved as being cost effective, all patients are legally entitled to treatments on the NHS.
Realistically, treatments are only approved as cost effective if they cost under £30,000 for every year of good quality life that they would provide. This means that new ground-breaking treatments could fail the criteria of being affordable and could be delayed or dismissed by NICE and health chiefs completely.
An effective treatment for cancer or dementia could soon be discovered, but these treatments could be kept from patients in desperate need of them as the NHS struggles to cover the cost under increasing budget pressures.
In the year 2014-15, NHS England spent £15.5bn on medicines, which is a 19.4% rise since 2010-11. The cost of drugs is increasingly rising due to the unscrupulous greed of pharmaceutical corporations, whilst NHS budgets are coming under more and more pressure.
The NHS is struggling to keep control of its finances, and the government are doing little to nothing about providing additional funding to our world-class healthcare services.
The public are continually demanding that NHS Budget Cuts and privatisation be reversed or halted. This however will do little to stop the NHS from being criminally overcharged for life saving medicines.
In the US, a bag of sterile salt water costs approximately $1 to produce, yet hospitals charge patients over $800 for such treatment. If budget cuts and privatisation continues in the UK's healthcare system, it won't be long until patients also face such high bills for treatment. It is only right that the NHS remains 100% public and that pharmaceutical companies are also brought into public ownership.
