As a GP working in London, it is not uncommon for me to hear people say they can’t afford prescription charges, or that they don’t have the money to buy their medication until they get paid at the end of the month. Some drugs are so expensive they are wholly out of people’s reach. “But if this is such an effective treatment, why isn’t it available free on the NHS?”, patients ask me.
I often struggle to respond. No one should be denied care on account of their ability to pay for treatment. Yet this is now a daily reality for many people, due to the creeping privatisation of our healthcare system by successive governments.
And, as a recent report by Channel 4’s Dispatches has shown – the programme revealed that US pharmaceutical companies have already been discussing raising drug prices in the event of a US/UK trade deal post-Brexit – denial of treatment on the NHS looks set to get a whole lot worse.
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If we want to know how bad things can be, we only have to look over to the United States. US citizens currently pay far more for medication produced by US pharmaceutical corporations than the price currently agreed for UK citizens through negotiations with the NHS – with devastating consequences. When the price of insulin medication was tripled in 2017, thousands of patients lost access to the drug, leading to multiple deaths. The high cost of drugs is one reason why US health outcomes are so dire.
President Trump has stated that he’s unhappy about this disparity between what we in the UK pay for drugs and what US citizens pay. But, unsurprisingly, the US president’s answer to American patients dying from an inability to afford overpriced medications is for us to pay the same artificially inflated prices too.
The US pharmaceutical industry is intent on making this happen. In the last two years alone they have collectively spent over half a billion dollars on lobbying ministers – and it appears to be working. In addition to the six official meetings between senior UK civil servants and their US counterparts, there have been five meetings behind closed doors with representatives of US pharmaceutical corporations to discuss drug pricing. And the one-sided outcomes of trade negotiations between the US and other countries thus far – such as Canada, Mexico and Korea – should serve as a warning signal to us all, with major consequences for our health and that of our loved ones.
Source: US-style healthcare would be a disaster for our NHS patients – so don’t vote for it | Ameen Kamlana
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