‘Questions of equity’ raised over public access to drugs
VHI patients getting treatment that is not available to public health patients raises question of fairness, the man in charge of buying drugs for the health service has said.
Professor Michael Barry, head of the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics (NCPE), made the comments following revelations that some new cancer drugs will be available to VHI members but not publicly from the HSE.
He also asked: ‘Will there be a VHI price and will there be a public HSE price?’ The NCPE is the body responsible for assessing the cost-effectiveness of pharmaceutical products before they are funded by the HSE.
Prof. Barry also told RTÉ’s Today With Seán O’Rourke: ‘The main problem that it raises of course is the issue of equity: a differential here where public patients may not be able to access therapies and private patients can.’
One of the drugs, Perjeta, was assessed in January by the NCPE, which concluded that although it was effective, it did not represent value for money.
‘We concluded that yes, there is value in the drug, but we felt that the price was too high at about €61,000 per patient per year,’ Prof. Barry said.
‘So we suggested to the HSE that negotiations would be required and they are ongoing at this point in time. That’s the usual process, where if we do find that the drug isn’t value for money, then the HSE negotiates a better price.’
He said the HSE has a wider remit to ensure it makes the best use of scarce healthcare resources, adding: ‘That’s the issue for us. The interesting point would be if you have a differential pricing of drugs.
‘Will there be a VHI price and will there be a public HSE price? But we won’t know that, because there’s no transparency in pricing anyway.’
Sinn Féin’s health spokeswoman Louise O’Reilly said that it was ‘unprecedented’ that a drug would become available privately only.
She said: ‘Ordinarily healthcare insurers follow the HSE and follow the public health service. In this instance, they’ve obviously cut a deal of their own.’