NICE, also known as National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, is the UK's system for determing the guidelines for medical practitioners as to how various conditions should be treated and whether or not a particular treatment should be funded. This layer of government decides if your medical condition merits treatment and what kinds of treatment. If they decide you get the treatment, it is given to you by the government system, paid for by the taxes you'd pay as a citizen of the UK. Yes, to be eligible you must be a citizen.
Up until very recently, the cancer drug Sutent, was
prohibited by NICE. If you had renal cell carcinoma or other cancers, you were not allowed to take Sutent - the "gold standard" for treating RCC. Previous to Sutent, patients with kidney cancer had no hope. Traditional chemo is not very effective against it and Sutent is a kidney cancer patient's best hope of surviving.
What if? What if our government takes over health care management and decides that Sutent is just too expensive to provide to those in the public option? That would be a swift death sentence for those who, like me, are a Stage IV cancer patient.
I hope the health care reform bill being debated soon in the Senate gets the swift death it deserves.
No comments:
Post a Comment