Another day, another inchoate slur against nationalized health care. Ronald Bailey, one of Reason's resident free marketeers, is up in arms about a British court ruling declaring that the health trusts -- Britain's nationalized insurers, basically -- can't provide drugs they don't normally cover based on opaque "extraordinary circumstances" reasoning, and overturning an instance in which they did so. If the Trusts want to withhold medicine, they either need a good reason (like cost), or need to offer the drug to all suffering from the affliction. Cruel, huh?
So far as I can tell, Bailey didn't actually read the article, nor any of the commentaries on the ruling, and he thinks this means fewer folks will get life-saving drugs like the breast cancer treatment Herceptin when, in fact, the Court ruled that the trust was wrong to withhold it in the first place. So the lay of the land is this: health trust denied an expensive breast cancer drug not approved for early stage cancer (but apparently potent against it), woman sued, judge overturned health trust and demanded they standardize their treatment formulary and refrain from making arbitrary decisions. If the trusts decide to withhold the drug, they need a good, stated reason. This, he sniffs, is how socialized medicine works. Would that American medicine worked similarly.
