Starmer and Streeting to give away £3 billion NHS cash to Trump
Donald Trump has announced a new trade deal with the UK that will allow UK pharmaceutical giants to sell tariff-free in the US – in return for the NHS spending another £3 billion on drugs from US pharmaceutical giants. The deal increases annual NHS spending on drugs by around 14% from its current £21.6bn and by 25% on ‘new’ medicines – an increase that comes while Health Secretary Wes Streeting refuses to meet NHS doctors’ entirely justified pay demands and lays off thousands of NHS staff.
As Al Jazeera notes, the deal involves the NHS and the UK’s ‘NICE’ scrapping existing ‘value appraisals’ to pay inflated US drug prices:
a major change in the value appraisal framework at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), a UK government body that determines whether new drugs are cost-effective for the NHS… NICE’s “quality-adjusted life year” measures the cost of a treatment for each healthy year it enables for a patient, with the upper threshold being 30,000 pounds ($39,789) per year.
Starmer and Streeting selling off the NHS to Trump
The deal will also allow US and UK ‘Big Pharma’ to reduce, massively, the amount of money, or ‘rebate’, that they are required to put back into the NHS under the statutory drug pricing scheme, from the current 23.4% (rising to 26% in 2027) and 30% on new branded medicines, down to just 15%.
The deal will put a huge extra burden on NHS budgets, with inevitable harm to NHS patients and staff at extra cost to tax-payers. But Big Pharma will benefit, so that’s ok then.
Never trust a Tory on the NHS – even when it wears a red rosette.
Featured image via the Canary
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Much as I hold Starmer and Streeting in contempt and would naturally be suspicious of the motives of any deal they might make, your reporting of the details of this ‘deal’ is at best obscure and at worst tendentious.
1. NICE which assesses the cost-effectiveness of new drugs, will increase its “quality-adjusted life year” (QALY) threshold by 25% (from £30,000 to £35,000 per year of healthy life gained). This means some expensive, innovative drugs that were previously deemed too costly will now be approved for NHS use. This modest change can OF ITSELF surely only be welcomed by patients with life threatening illnesses since NICE has frequently been criticised in the past for its contempt for the value of human life. If Streeting had announced that this change was to be funded by a small tax increase on the wealthy, we would surely be applauding.
2. The decrease in the rebate paid by pharmaceutical companies from 23.4% to 15% is indeed a source of concern, though it is not clear how much of the £3 billion total estimated cost is accounted for by this factor. However in evaluating the deal as a whole it is necessary to ask what alternative Starmer and Co actually had in the face of Trump’s very real threats. It doesn’t appear to me that a putative leftwing Green or Yourparty government would have been in any position to secure a better deal in this particular negotiation at the present time.
3. Given the above considerations the only remedy to the financial hit which the NHS may suffer as a consequence, at least in the short term, lies not in trying to unpick the ‘deal’ but rather in increasing the funding available to the NHS, by renationalising the NHS – i.e. reversing outsourcing – and increasing general taxation on the wealthy, both of which are of course agreed policies of the left which are anathema to the Starmer-Streeting gang.
Apologies for a minor error in point 1 of my comment above:
The increase from £30,000 to £35,000 is of course not 25%.. in fact NICE operates a more complicated system with a range of maximum cost values attached to a Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY). The existing range is £20,000 to £30,000 per QALY and the new range resulting from the deal will be: £25,000 to £35,000 per QALY. The lower value in each case represents that at which medical treatment is generally considered ‘cost effective’ , whereas other factors may be considered by NICE in determining whether a treatment is ‘cost effective’ where the cost per QALY lies between the lower and upper values. The increase in the lower values from £20,000 to £25,000 is 25%. which should mean that a larger number of patients become eligible for treatment by new life-extending drugs.