How much would you spend so that you could live until December 8th, 2009?
One more year of life versus wasting to death in one day, week, month (you choose)?
Hopefully it would be more than $45,500.
And hopefully you don’t live in the UK.
When Bruce Hardy’s kidney cancer spread to his lung, his doctor recommended an expensive new pill from Pfizer. But Mr. Hardy is British, and the British health authorities refused to buy the medicine. His wife has been distraught.
“Everybody should be allowed to have as much life as they can,†Joy Hardy said in the couple’s modest home outside London. If the Hardys lived in the United States or just about any European country other than Britain, Mr. Hardy would most likely get the drug, although he might have to pay part of the cost. A clinical trial showed that the pill, called Sutent, delays cancer progression for six months at an estimated treatment cost of $54,000.
But at that price, Mr. Hardy’s life is not worth prolonging, according to a British government agency, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. The institute, known as NICE, has decided that Britain, except in rare cases, can afford only £15,000, or about $22,750, to save six months of a citizen’s life.
Let us all hope that when the Democrats stick us with some shit-eating health care “reform†they have a reasonable price ceiling.
There was a similar case in Manchester recently.
The NHS spent GBP17000 on legal costs fighting a woman. That would have paid for the drug she needed for six months.