Who Gets Expensive Cancer Drugs? A Tale Of Two Nations

The well-worn notion that patients in the United States have unfettered access to the most expensive cancer drugs while the United Kingdom’s nationalized health care system regularly denies access to some high-cost treatments needs rethinking, a team of bioethicists and health policy experts says in a report out today.

Delving into the question of expensive cancer drugs and who gets them, the team, led by Ruth R. Faden, Ph.D., director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute for Bioethics, found both systems are far from perfect  and both drew them into a hot-button issue of the current U.S. health care reform debate: rationing.

Critics of the U.K. system say care there is rationed — that patients are denied some expensive therapies so that better health care can be provided to the nation as a whole. Critics of the U.S. system say care is rationed here, too — that only those with the very best insurance and those who can afford sky-high out-of-pocket expenses have meaningful access to any and all high-priced therapies, especially at the end of life.

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