BrianGarst.com

From Britain, but the same basic story could just as well be told from America:

The head of the NHS rationing watchdog has said he is ‘genuinely sorry’ for a delay in approving a new treatment for blindness.

But campaigners said Andrew Dillon’s comments would be of little consolation to the thousands of Britons who have lost their sight in the two years it took NICE to make its final decision.

The watchdog has now approved Lucentis, which is used to treat wet age-related macular degeneration, a condition which affects 26,000 new sufferers every year.

NICE’s original recommendation was that patients had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they would be given treatment to save the sight in the other.

The proposal caused a huge public outcry from doctors and campaigners, prompting a U-turn in December last year before further consultation resulted in the final decision today.

NHS thought it was their responsibility to decide what level of risk warranted use of this drug. The public vehemently disagreed with the determination that the drug was only worth taking after eye-sight was lost in one eye.

Why is the individual’s own judgment not sufficient? Let people decide when they want to take a drug and risk the side-effects, not government. If they want to wait until they are blind in one eye, then they can. But no one knows better than the individual how to properly weigh the consequences of their choices.

Proponents of government interventionism always promote these watchdog groups as protecting consumers, but what they really do is needlessly delay the operation of the market. The real beneficiaries are the drug manufacturers, whose already approved products need not face the level of competition they otherwise would without government meddling.

Freedom is a wonderful thing. Let it happen.

Hat tip: OpenMarket.org

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