After knowiongly selling us half a billion pounds worth of Tamilfu that was next to useless, Pharmaceutical company Roche are back in the news again this time they are trying to scam even more money from the taxpayers pot.
This week, the NHS drugs regulator Nice, said it could not approve a treatment for advanced breast cancer because Roche is asking £90,000 per patient. Nice says that even though the drug, Kadcyla, can extend the life of patients by six months, the cost is prohibitive.
After the Conservative Party's vicious onslaught on the countries public servises, the NHS has been especially hit hard with reduced spending and less staff and talk of a £30bn hole in the NHS that will somehow need to be plugged, it is hardly surprising that Nice has decided to turn down the Kadcyla drug.
Roche, who made a £12bn profit last year, has had the gall to criticise Nice for 'failing to safeguard the interests of patients' by refusing to pay the price they want, deflecting the blame onto the buyer not wanting to bankrupt an already tottering Health Service rather than them for holding the NHS to ransom.
It is unlikely that the money spinning pharmaceutical companies are going to set their prices lower and it has become obvious that the NHS cannot afford to be held to ransom by these companies so unless a cheaper alternative can be found, cancer patients will be the ones suffering and it won't be the fault of the NHS, it will be the companies that put profit before everything else, including peoples lives.
3 comments:
NHS is socialism in action.
What Roche is doing is Capitalism inaction.
I'm sure the Government will use it as another reason to privatise it.
I call the Tories enough names so i'm sure i have called them all the above at some point.
nog and i live 3 hours apart and at times are much closer. easy for us to connect. also, we are facebook friends.
but how would we know if cheezy died? versus just got tired on bantering with me? i mean do you know him or ever see him?
if has been a while since the virtual entity known as cheezy commented.
q
I never meet with people i speak to online, keep the two very much separate. I guessed he had just dipped out for a while like people do online. I know he is on facebook with some people who once came here so i'm sure one of them would drop by to tell us if he was dead.
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