This is really nothing more than idle musing but a point that I haven’t seen made about the costs of medical care:

So I think it’s time we encouraged our government to have a little
foresight. Yes, cancer agents are extremely expensive, but it pays to
remember that a £20,000 course of chemotherapy is a far better
investment than the costs of treating recurrent cancer and providing
terminal care two years down the line.

It’s that £20,000 cost. The reason the drugs cost so much is because they are patented and they are patented so as to allow for recouping the cost of their development, along with profit, so that there is an incentive to go and find more such treatments. Leave aside, for the moment, whether this is the best system of doing so and think about the life of the patent. It’s very rare for one to last 10 years after a drug has come out of development so costs then plummet as the generic manufacturers move in.

Now we do hear a lot about how health care costs are going to rise dramatically in coming years, an increasingly elderly population etc, as well as new treatments coming online. Thus the necessity of rationing in some form.

However, the costs of the new pharmaceuticals are actually a balloon moving through the system, not a permanent step up to a new cost level (as opposed to the other costs, like labour, the increasing elderly population etc. which are a step up). As long as increasingly effective  drugs keep being rolled out then there will still be that balloon. But at some point we’ll actually find (whether in a decade or a century) a cure, which will then go out of patent in due time and costs will fall again. Just as we have done with measles (a cheap vaccine) or diarrhea (spelling?…oral rehydration therapy) or high blood pressure etc etc etc.

Not the most amazing insight of all time I know, just a thought, but of the financial pressures that the health service (however financed) faces the idea that we’ll end up paying £20,000 a year for a course of treatment for cancer forever simply isn’t true. We’re paying it now so that in the future we won’t have to.