Be Excellent To Each Other

If that's true, then I've officially gone semi-blind.
[edit]@Cavey saying things about what he's said, obv.
HRM. I don't really know what to think.

The NHS isn't there to just save lives though. It's mandate is to help people with medical issues ranging from massive coronary failure right through to a verruca. You're on exceedingly thin ice saying that we shouldn't bother providing people respite and assistance if it's not a life-threatening condition.

HIV is a non life-threatening condition, for example.

[edit]As, actually, are most things. Doesn't pneumonia kill more people than anything else, simply because that's what normally comes along and finishes dying people off?

Well to be fair, I am categorically not saying that, obviously. However, what I am saying, is that the default answer to drug companies, when offering their latest drugs for chronic, non life threatening conditions, must not be 'yes', otherwise the NHS shows itself to be utterly toothless and we all pay over the odds. It's shitty, certainly, and will mean that not everyone will be as well as they could be if we simply rolled over to the drugs companies every time, but there we are. Of course, a regulated 'reasonable' profit margin for all drugs, both new and existing, such as the type I briefly describe above, could overcome this, if only the pharma companies bought into it.

If you're looking for a bogeyman here, blame greedy pharma companies, not the taxpayer.

[edit] - DUH. Misread 'HIV' for 'IVF'... what a twatto.

The other plus point to CC's idea is that it might bring drugs that are considered 'too expensive' down to a price the NHS could afford.

at what you actually wrote.

at what you meant.

Ah FUCK! IVF, HIV, it's all the same innit?

Any point editiing it?

They could offer Homeopathy as an alternative

Isn't that kind of what NICE is meant to do? Weigh up the cost / benefit ratios and recommend whether to purchase a certain drug or not, and when and when not to use it?

Simples. Only do 'cutting off' procedures and no 'sticking on' ones.

Can't we re-use the cut-off ones in the sticking on procedures, therefore saving the taxpayers money?

I suppose, they'd have to share beds mind.

Why all the blankets and pillows? Couldn't doctors ask patients to wear extra clothes and get them to sleep on the floor too, beds are fucking pricey.

That's exactly what they do. And then they get pilloried in the press for not allowing people to have £3,000,000,000 a day cancer treatments that extend their life by two days.* WE DRESERVED AN EXTRA TWO DAYS WITH OUR MAM AND THE NHS KILLT HER


*Numbers may be approximate.

Well, they're not doing it very well are they, given the aforementioned size of big pharma profits. By the sounds of it, they just take the purchase price of a given drug as read, too, only comparing benefits vs. this 'cost'. Not exactly the brightest procurement strategy, given the 20-year patent monopoly scenario for newly patented, exclusively manfactured drugs.

Like I said, a bloody good screw.

Banned.

You know there's an NHS pricing thingy, right? That limits the prices companies can charge? And that it isn't set by NICE?

Fuck, FACTS! Cheese it!

/runs

Quite - the problem with Cavey's suggestion is that it would prioritise spending that money on giving an old lady two more days of life over improving the quality of life for someone who could live for 30 years by, for example, allowing them to walk.

Deciding what the NHS spends its money on is one hell of a minefield and I'm glad I'm not in any way involved.

Yes indeed; we must surely cut schools/hospitals/staff/care standards, and instead keep lining the pockets of PLC pharmaceutical companies 'cause it's all a bit nasty and ungentlemanly arguing the toss over the exorbitant costs of new drugs, against a backdrop of enormous profits, even after massively disproportionate overheads have been extracted.

Any NHS mission statement should contain the line, near the top, that says 'We recognise that everyone is going to die one day'.

I am sick of reports that 'More people are dying of cancer than ever before' or similar, and ludicrously expensive strategies to reduce the death rate attached to that illness. More people are dying of cancer, partly because less people are dying of TB and Smallpox.

When my ex was a nurse in Birmingham, her hospital had very expensive new facilities for heart disease which were full of very old people who were probably also nearly dead from 10 other things at the same time. There was also a specialist cancer care unit that had cost hundreds of millions dealing with trendy cancers.

Her ward (bowel cancer, generally) was full of dying middle aged and young people who were otherwise healthy but couldnt get treatment for their condition priortised as there were no funds, as bowel cancer wasn't headline grabbing enough. Still isn't.

See also: Bollock cancer. always overshadowed by the boobies. 'nads aren't as photogenic for the campaigns, clearly.

I can't believe you managed to get:

and


so close together.

Fucking disease prevention costs a fortune too.

These days you're unlikely to get measles, mumps or rubella & even if you did who gives a shit about unborn children anyway.

Quite. On a long enough timeline, everyone's survival odds are 0%



A friend of mine died of bowel cancer aged 33. He was otherwise in perfect health. I bet he wished it had been breast cancer.

Whether it's 'nice' or some other bloody useless, toothless governmental quango/talking shop/committee or other, I couldn't give a toss. All sementics as far as I'm concerned. The point that you and others seem to be missing is this: given the bloated profits of the pharmaceutical companies, even after all the massive 'overheads' are taken off their bottom line (the kind of 'overheads' that most normal businesses could only dream of), they're not doing a very good job then, are they?

Oh, and for the record, I am not, of course, saying that the NHS should only treat life threatening conditions, obviously. Just that it shouldn't necessarily be treating non life threatening conditions @ £1000/week (or more), using the latest designer drugs, where much cheaper (and perhaps less effective) remedies are available (indeed were the only drugs available perhaps 2 or 3 years ago). If the drugs companies cannot sell for such exorbitant prices, they'd soon come down even without any formal regulatory framework. That's the law of the market - a very simple concept to understand and yet inconceivably, there's been precious little of that these last 13 years. It's why we are where we are in the first place; shit, it's only billions of pounds of all of our money that's at stake here, afterall.

A bit of business nowse would go a long, long way in the NHS, seems to me, as indeed elsewhere within the public sector.

A good piece in the Indy if anyone's interested:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 67257.html

That builder chap from Ground Force had breast cancer.

I think hospital staff should pray for their patients. It is cheap and it does some good.

What's wrong with psychiatry, Grim...?

Er, dunno, what?

He is perhaps referring to this.

Psychiatrists are frauds and charlatans who refuse to acknowledge that thetans are the cause of all mental health issues.

Oh yeah, course. That was just a joke around the whole "people don't think psychiatrists are real doctors" thing.

Although I am wary of just how good a job they actually do, as it hard to quantify.

I'm perhaps thinking of Chiropractors.

Which one is Frasier and which one is Alan?

I always get those confused with psychologists, who do magic tricks on telly.

You're probably right, though for selfish reasons I'd be reluctant to properly admit it. Thing is though, what if "less effective" = "not effective"?



Your problem is that the UK NHS isn't the sole market for the big pharma companies, not by a long shot.

I always get those confused with psychopaths, who saw women in half but forget the second half of the trick.

There are also several different categories of drugs arrangements within the UK, which is quite important. Prescription drugs and generics are subject to centrally set price controls, and I think the DoH has the PPRS sewn up reasonably well there, but the hospital only drugs aren't price regulated, and that's where you get your cancer treatments. If all the big pharma companies want to charge shit loads for granny's breast cancer treatment, what else can you do? The fact the big pharma companies have been investigated for collusion in price fixing tells you something too.

I concur.

Wait, you mean you're not taking medicine to cure your violent flatulence?

The £1000 a month increases my flatulence levels. It's an Arts Council subsidy.

It's pest control, that's what it is.

Everyone goes on about Big Pharma profits but how big are their profits as an actual percentage of their operating costs? What I mean is even if you found some way to batter them down on price through some sort of legislation how much would it even be possible for you to save before the profit margins became such that embarking on expensive and possibly fruitless research was no longer attractive to them?

Judging by Coffey, not that good.



But in reality, they allow a lot of otherwise utterly mental people some kind of normal life.

Apart from those possessed by thetans.

That's why mine are always clean shaven, so I can stand on my head and pop them in a little wonderbra at photo shoots.

Well, quite, but CC seems pretty adamant that they're making megabucks at the expense of the public purse.

They do rake in a lot of money, but what's that saying? It may cost $0.01 per pill, but the first pill cost $2,000,000,000? One needs to bear in mind that every single drug that's produced covers the cost of quite a few different drugs that were looked at, developed, and then rejected in favour of the one they went with in the end. Whether becuse those other drugs ultimately didn't work or whatever reaosn.

I'm never going to buy the first pill then. Do they think we're fucking stupid?

They market the first one as being compatible with HDMI and gold plated leads, see.

Not to mention that that first pill has to cover their huge marketing budgets - on average about twice their R&D budget, I think.

Jesus, you'd need a big glass of water.

Sorry Cavey, but you suggesting pharmaceutical companies shouldn't be allowed to make so much profit because, hey, people need that stuff makes me giggle a bit. I can never gauge where you're going to stand on issues like this.