Obama/Daschle Health Plan: Killing You NICE

May 27, 2009—How long cancer victims live, as well as human survival against several other major disease killers, show clearly that the so-called NICE, the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, is knowingly shortening the lives of Britons struck by these illnesses. It is ruling that people suffering from certain states of various cancers, for example, are "lives not worthy to be lived" although treatments could give them months to years, or in some cases even decades more of life. European medical groups and associations are increasingly charging directly, that the nasty "NICE," set up in 1998, has been cutting off lives in this manner—the manner made infamous in Hitler's September 1939 order on the chronically ill and mentally ill.

But NICE is the explicit model for the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research which President Obama and Peter Orszag want to put at the center of healthcare "reform"; and NICE was the explicit model for the "national healthcare board" which Obama's sponsor and would-be healthcare czar, Sen. Tom Daschle, put at the center of healthcare "reform" in his 2008 book (see separate report).

A March European Journal of Cancer editorial attacking NICE, says that the British agency—which rules on which treatments are to be accessible, and under what conditions—has become gradually more restrictive, year by year, and increasingly based its rulings not on clinical effectiveness, but on cost effectiveness, which is quite different. Last year, to take only one example, NICE rejected four drugs for advanced kidney or lung cancer, while acknowledging, The Independent reported, that "the drugs do extend life by up to six months, but the money would be better spent on other patients." But NICE has also progressively reduced accessibility of radiology treatments for cancer, causing those who have gone through chemotherapy to wait many months for radiation treatment, or have to forgo it entirely. After six years of NICE, the wait for radiology had doubled to six weeks; after ten years, it had nearly doubled again to 11 weeks, according to the (U.S.-based) Commonwealth Foundation.

The results are clear in new, 2008 studies by the Swedish Karolinska Institute and by the British College of Radiologists. Among women, 10-18% fewer Britons survive 5 years after breast cancer diagnosis, than women in other major European countries or the United States; the rates range from 71% in France, down to 53% in the UK. Among men, 10% fewer Britons survive various cancers for five years; the numbers range from 53% in France down to 43% in the UK. Hundreds of thousands of lives are cut off early under NICE's rulings.

In the case of beta interferon treatments of multiple sclerosis—given to 15% of European MS sufferers, but only 1% of those in the UK—NICE in 2001 ruled that the "clinical benefits appear to be outweighed by very high costs."