Sask Progressive writes about the NDP SK Government decision to not pay for a vital cancer treatment drug for sick people. This is the NDP admitting the death of socialized medicine. Behold there will be no funeral, it will just continue on undead, killing others in its path as people fail to take out insurance or properly save to invest in their healthcare in the future. 2 Tier Health has arrived, and the NDP has ironically ushered it into the province.
Pharmacutical companies make drugs from pennies worth of chemicals, and sell it for thousands. It’s a big scam, considering the ultimate point of creating new drugs is to save lives, not to make money. We wouldn’t consider these days witholding insulin from a diabetic if they couldn’t afford it. Why withhold the best drug for colon cancer sufferers when the materials in the drug cost no more than insulin [I'm assuming]. Sure R&D is expensive, but our economy is the thing that is messed up. How we cope with our single minded profit driven Capitalist system would be pretty entertaining, if it weren’t so cruel sometimes.
The point of drugs is to save lives, not to make X amount of money.
Making money is worthless, saving lives is priceless. Money doesn’t mean much if people you care about are dead - in other words. Either we care about our fellow Saskies, or we don’t and will let them die.
We may spend about half of our taxes on health care, but that’s still not enough - seriously. The amount of preventable suffering in the province and the world is a good indicator that we don’t invest enough human resources into prevention and treatment of injury and illness. What really matters to the world, making sure Paris Hilton has more money than God, or giving dozens of cancer patients in Saskatchewan the drug they need to live longer and happier lives? That’s a rhetorical question, because we can see the sad answer every day. It’s not a coincidence that the word patient describes a person waiting for medical treatment in Canada.
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How many of you readers figure that no one complained to Canada Post about their missing mail? It’s sad that the police try to blame the public for Canada Post’s poor hiring and employee supervision techniques. Still a lot of people were probably happy about how little junk mail they were getting too.
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Todd | 03-Apr-06 at 1:35 pm | Permalink
I must be one of those Paxil users that you aren’t impressed with regarding their attitudes or behaviour, but the cancer drug you are talking about isn’t going to save their lives. It will prolong it but at a cost of $5,000 per month. Thinking about my parents, I would do everything to try to help them get the drug if they needed it if I could give them even one more month of life. But when does a procedure become so expensive and only able to sustain life for an extra month or two that it would hurt affordability of the system for everyone. If paying for this drug means that we can’t afford to pay for drugs or procedures that *will* save lives, should we pay for them? Just something to think about.
Saskboy | 03-Apr-06 at 5:45 pm | Permalink
Todd, let me clarify a point you brought up from another blog entry.
I don’t generally respect someone’s choice to go on a pharmacutical solution when the cause of an illness is unknown, or potentially effective non-medicinal means haven’t yet been tried. With something like cancer, timing of treatment is essential and extending someone’s comfortable life by many months is money well spent. My argument though is that the drug itself isn’t likely made of expensive materials and could be made on the black market for pennies. Is it right that a company can hold a patent on an invention that saves lives, and thus price some people out of the best treatment humanity has devised for an illness? People are dying sooner than they would because of a patent - an idea on a bit of paper.
I agree some things need rationing in order for us to not run out of them, but drug rationing in a developed nation is cruel and not at all adhering to the principle of socialized medicine.