Cost is no reason to deny this child care

Widdecombe

WHEN the Blair government set up NICE ( National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) I predicted that it would prove rather nasty and I was certainly right for this body decides drugs policy for the NHS based not only on efficacy but also cost.

Thus for years patients who could buy Lucentis privately carried on seeing while those who could not went blind from macular degeneration and that is just one example of the two- tier health service the drugs policy guarantees.

Now it is being taken to extremes by the refusal of a drug to a 12- year- old- girl, Abi Longfellow, because her condition is so rare that the effectiveness of the highly expensive medicine is “unproved”. Yet that same expensive medicine is being made available to children with less severe conditions.

There are many hands on the driving wheel of this crazy course. The drug manufacturer Alexion Phar maceuticals rakes in some £ 103million so presumably could afford to drop the price of the drug, which costs a hair- raising £ 136,000- a- year, but will not. The NHS could regard the rule book as a servant not a master but does not. The consultant could simply defy the rules and administer the drug anyway but does not. The Government could review the policy and change it but has not. So a 12- year- old suffers and could even die.

Meanwhile the NHS has money to treat those who eat, drink, smoke and drug themselves into illness. It funds fertility treatment for single women and dishes out contraceptives to under- age girls. It employs an army of penpushers filling in endless government statistics.

Even Carry On Matron portrays a saner world.