Author Topic: In UK's NHS: Too fat for surgery: Patients refused treatment unless they change  (Read 1004 times)

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Offline LadyVirginia

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What we have to look forward to...


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The NHS has been accused of rationing vital treatments after refusing to help ‘undeserving’ patients unless they lose weight or quit smoking.
It is denying patients hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery or even IVF unless they agree to make radical changes to their lifestyle.
An investigation has revealed that one in four health trusts in England bars certain operations or procedures for smokers or those deemed too fat.


They include NHS Hertfordshire, which has banned certain patients from any operation requiring a general anaesthetic other than lifesaving surgery on their hearts, brains or to remove cancer.
Instead they are being sent on weight management courses or to ‘stop smoking’ clinics and told to come back only when they lead healthier lives.
MPs and senior doctors last night accused the NHS of ‘withholding treatment’ from anyone whose lifestyle it disapproves of.
However, managers at Health Service trusts insisted that such restrictions are in people’s ‘best interests’.


from the Daily Mail



h/t Jay Webber
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Offline IronDioPriest

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The best you get from American Leftists when this example is held up by OCare opponents as the future of OCare, is a change in subject. They know it's true, and they know that we know that they know it's true. They're just doing what they think they need to to cling to however much of this bill that they can until the private health care market comes crashing down under the regulatory burden, and then they think the people will be clamoring for Unca Shuggah to step in and save the day. They're probably right. That's why getting rid of OCare is now or never.

These bastards play long-ball. Obama said as much, here...

Obama on single payer health insurance
"A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means."

- Thomas Jefferson

Offline AlanS

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As my kids used to say when we were traveling: ARE WE THERE YET?  ::overkill::
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Online Pandora

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Why the American NICE Will Not Be Like the British NICE

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The United Kingdom’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has now issued its final ruling on the new cancer drug, Nexavar, which has proven effective in treating liver cancer. NICE will not cover Nexavar “because its high cost could not be justified by its marginal benefit.”

...

But alas, Nexavar is expensive. Very expensive.

...

The UK’s NICE was not being evil when it declined to pay for Nexavar. NICE simply did the math, and determined that spending money for the marginal benefit provided by Nexavar would create too high an opportunity cost – that is, that money would be better spent elsewhere, on other patients, for greater gain.

This is what open healthcare rationing looks like. It’s ugly, all right. But because it is open and transparent, making clear to everyone the rationale for its coverage decisions, NICE gives the British electorate all the information it needs to decide whether to accept the process, or to change it. This is far better – far more equitable and far less destructive to a society – than rationing healthcare covertly. DrRich tips his hat to NICE.

But DrRich notes that this recent decision by NICE has caused some of his conservative friends to descend into major bouts of caterwauling. Horrified that NICE has condemned liver cancer patients to an avoidable premature death, they insist we all notice that Obamacare creates an Outcomes Research Institute that is modeled after the British NICE, and so, we could soon have the same kinds of coverage decisions here in the U.S. American citizens, they demand, must consider how well they will like it when some government “panel” refuses to cover life-saving medical therapies because they are too expensive.

DrRich agrees that Americans will not like it much at all, but believes his conservative colleagues are overlooking an important difference between the British NICE, and any American NICE that might accompany our new healthcare system.

The Brits are plagued with a constant deluge of new medical products that are extremely expensive, and that, like Nexavar, offer real but only marginal improvements over current, cheaper therapies. Each time NICE has to render a coverage decision on one of these new therapies, the process is painful for everyone involved. But, being Brits, when faced with a difficult but necessary task they suck it up and carry on.

It is important to note, however, that the British NICE is required to deal with a constant stream of new medical products only because there is a ready market for those products elsewhere, and that market is in the U.S.

For, in the U.S., we have always recognized that medical progress usually occurs in incremental steps, and that to encourage continued medical progress we have to accept (and pay for) these incremental steps. That is, medical progress is much like all other forms of progress. Americans famously went to the moon, for instance, but did not do so all at once. Hundreds of incremental steps were required, several of which were seemingly trivial and expensive, and others of which involved catastrophe and tragedy. But we all understood that this is how one gets to the moon.

So a product like Nexavar, which does not cure liver cancer but gets us one step closer, would traditionally be viewed in the U.S. as an important incremental step toward the ultimate goal. And indeed, in contrast to the British NICE, the FDA has approved the use of Nexavar for liver cancer. This approval, in turn, encourages medical industry to keep going.

But consider: If a new American NICE steps in, and begins refusing to cover treatments that provide only incremental improvements, then the companies that invest hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve those incremental steps will simply stop doing so. After our new American NICE refuses to cover Nexavar-like therapies two or three times, medical industry will get the message loud and clear, and as a simple matter of corporate survival will change its business model. And the rapid succession of new medical therapies we have enjoyed will stop, or at least slow markedly.*

This means, of course, that if our new American NICE can just find the intestinal fortitude to make a few tough calls like the one the Brits have just made, and stick with those tough calls despite the firestorm that may ensue, then the hard part of their job will end. Forever. Pretty soon, they simply won’t be faced with any more Nexavars.

The healthcare bureaucrats in Britain and elsewhere around the world, whose jobs are made very difficult by the continual medical progress which is stimulated by the traditional American healthcare system, are cheering on our new reforms. Most especially, they are praying that the American NICE will have enough backbone to do what needs to be done. If the Americans can just make a few of the tough calls the Brits and others have had to make routinely, the job of healthcare bureaucrats will become vastly easier all over the world.

In any case, the prospect raised by conservative alarmists – of a NICE-like panel that is forever condemning American patients to an early death through their refusal to cover effective new therapies – will be only a very temporary phenomenon. After a very short time, such coverage decisions will no longer be necessary, and Americans will no longer be subjected to the anguish these decisions will provoke.


    *If individual Americans are permitted to purchase with their own money medical products that are not approved for coverage by the government, then at least some stimulus will persist for continued medical progress. But as DrRich has documented in detail, the plan is to disallow such individual prerogatives.

I've spent some time reading DrRich's blog, "Covert Rationing" and have received some enlightenment on our own medical system in this country.  He is of the opinion that rationing has been occurring here as well, and has been for decades; the one difference between the US and the other countries is the rationing there is done openly and here it is covert.
"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." - Mark Twain

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Offline LadyVirginia

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I've spent some time reading DrRich's blog, "Covert Rationing" and have received some enlightenment on our own medical system in this country.  He is of the opinion that rationing has been occurring here as well, and has been for decades; the one difference between the US and the other countries is the rationing there is done openly and here it is covert.

I'll have to check that blog out.

Without having read his blog I'd have to say that I agree that there's been rationing here-- and I think it often comes in the form of attitude.

We don't have a culture of life in this country. 

Sooooooo if you don't fit the protocol you're out of luck depending on the doctor you have. And the hospital you in. 



"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."