BrianGarst.com

Britain’s government run National Health Service has won a court ruling allowing it to deny $5-a-day medications to Alzheimer’s patients in the earliest stages of the debilitating disease.

Drug companies and campaigners yesterday lost a high court appeal for people in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s to be prescribed on the NHS a ?2.50-a-day drug which is said to provide relief from the symptoms and respite for families.

. . .The organisation decided in November that three acetyl cholinesterase inhibitors – Aricept, Reminyl and Exelon – should only be prescribed to patients in the moderate but not earliest stages of the disease. Eisai and Pfizer, which make and market Aricept, supported by patient groups, sought a judicial review.

Yesterday, Paul Hooper, managing director of Eisai, said: “The guidance Nice has issued is morally reprehensible. They are denying patients access to early treatment and that is wrong. This is about patients, not profits. For Nice to deny treatment to patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease is disgraceful.”

Woah woah woah woah woah. Back this trolley on up. How can a benevolent, government-run, bureaucrats wet-dream of a health service possibly be motivated by profits? Surely they do only what is in the best interest of the patient, right? Well, not so much:

The ruling means the drug will not be available for people in the earliest stages of the disease, allowing the decision of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), that Aricept’s benefits are too slight to justify prescribing, to stand.

So now we come to the rub. The British NHS, which keeps one in eight patients waiting over a year for treatment, has decided which benefits are worth treatment and which are not. What criteria do they use to make this judgment? Who knows. But where is the individual in this process? Where is freedom to make ones own decisions? How is it so hard to comprehend that it is antithetical to freedom to allow governments the power to decide what is in the best interest of the citizen. Hillary Clinton wants to impose this dictatorial failure of a health system on Americans. We must firmly and clearly reject this assault on liberty.

Hat tip: BizzyBlog (via National Center Blog)