A leading health economist has suggested that NICE’s new year’s resolutions should include lowering the cut-off threshold for new drugs from £30,000 per quality adjusted life year gained to £20,000.
Professor Alan Maynard’s suggestion comes in the wake of the recent re-announcement of the Government’s response to the Richards Review on drug top-ups, which has suggested that for end-of-life rarer conditions such as cancer, the cut-off threshold should be raised to £70,000 / QALY.
Professor Maynard, whose OBE was announced in the New Year Honours list, also points to findings from a House of Comons Health Select Committee report that the Scottish Medicines Consortium, which reviews new technologies within six months, has reached “remarkably similar conclusions” to those on NICE, and proposes that this duplication is wasteful.
Discriminating against those not near the end of life
Maynard also argues that the £70,000 threshold for people with rarer end-of-life illnesses represents “an arbitrary equity value judgment (which) is inherently unfair for those not in the last two years of life”.
He also emphasises that NICE has much work to do in removing from use existing technologies already adopted in the NHS that are not demonstrably cost-effective. Writing on Health Policy Insight, Maynard suggests that the current recession’s inevitable effect on NHS funding “requires NICE to pay much more attention to marginal technologies already being used in the NHS, as their elimination will free resources to provide better patient care”.
Maynard also suggests that NICE should work “much harder to acquire a price setting role” – a radical proposal, given the existing barrage of negative publicity NICE has faced over its refusals to approve products for NHS use.
