UK government officials are planning cuts to the Cancer Drugs Fund
(CDF). The fund allocates money to purchase drugs for National Health
Service (NHS) patients that have not been approved by the National
Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and are not normally
obtainable on the NHS in England. Prime Minister David Cameron declared, “Other European countries are
doing better than us at giving people longer, happier lives with cancer.
“We want to get more drugs to people more quickly and in the UK today
there are some people, thousands of people, who want a certain cancer
drug, whose doctors tell them they should have a certain cancer drug,
who don’t get it.” Cameron promised to bring in a new system of “value-based pricing,”
rather than one based purely on cost. It was supposed to increase the
availability of new drugs, lower their cost and encourage the
pharmaceutical industry to carry out research it would otherwise not
have done.
Over 50,000 patients have benefited from the fund since 2011, half of
them in 2014. It has become a vital lifeline for patients allowing them
to obtain the latest drugs, particularly in cases of terminal cancer. However, due to entirely predictable rising demand, the CDF’s
original annual budget of £200 million has risen to £340 million. The
government now wants to reduce the list of 65 cancer drugs by 37 items,
severely depleting the capacity of oncologists in the fight against
cancer and affecting the survival rates of an estimated 10,500 cancer
patients next year.
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