Multinational drug firms seeking to crash the gates of the UK’s National Health Service are getting a boost from the White House. The Guardian says that the US deputy health secretary wants the NHS formulary open to every new drug and wants the British government to permit consumer drug advertising rather than limiting it to doctors.
Alex Azar also said the UK should consider supplementing the NHS with private plans as the US has done with Medicare. Whether Azar thinks those plans should include the yawning drug coverage gap now facing many US Medicare subscribers isn’t clear but he did indirectly indicate that the US prohibition on government-wide price negotiations with drug companies, which has provided the companies a huge windfall in the US, is a good idea for the UK as well.
Why a top US health department official is out shilling for drug companies is a question left unanswered, perhaps because it doesn’t require one. Certainly the question of why the US would wish its own massively inefficient and enormously profitable private health care system on the UK doesn’t. US foreign policy is evidently dead in the water but some priorities can survive any shock.
I think there is a lot us Brits can learn from a country that spends more on health care per person, yet has more strokes, heart disease and forces individuals to pay more for medication (not to mention the barrage of advertising aimed at uninformed people hoping that they will overrule their doctors).
Aneurin Bevan must be turning in his grave…
Certainly. You need also to drop 15=20% of your population from NHS coverage so that they need not fret about the indignities of it. These should preferably be lower middle-class people to prevent them from overly swelling the ranks of the comfortable.
A while back I linked something on, I think it was Angry Bear, or maybe Ezra Klein’s blog, about the differences in health care systems in Euprope and North America. And the statistic that interested me most of the period of time at the end of life during which people were in poor health. And even here in Britain, people spent less of their last years really sick.
I’m not sure exactly how that happens, but you know what? I think that’s what most of us are aiming for. Over here we can expect to live at least as long as Americans, but still be less miserable in the end. But I’d be perfectly happy to give up a year or two at the end of my life if it meant all of my years would be reasonable healthy and able years.
You’d have to be stupid to think that adopting American health policies would be good for Britain. But it’s not stupidity I’m worried about. Tony Blair has proven to be outrageously willing to destroy what is best about this country in the name of being more like what his rich friends want.
(And anyway, we already have private health care and insurance programs available for those who want to pay for it. It’s just that most people aren’t that insane.)
I have never been a good gambler but if I had to do it I would feel comfortable betting that consideration of the impact on British quality of life is not among the top 100 reasons the US is promoting these ideas.