The list of expensive drugs covered by the prime minister’s special fund for such life-saving drugs is said to be removing some vital cancer medicines from the selection.
The price of extending a life via cancer treatments may be too costly for Cancer Drugs Funds
England’s Cancer Drugs Fund was designed by Prime Minister, David Cameron in 2010 to provide patients with access to effective treatments that were deemed too costly for hospitals to fund.
However, the fund will now introduce price-restrictions bringing 42 of the drugs to be reassessed. The issue is that the drugs must be cost effective for the NHS to make them routinely available and the Cancer Drugs Fund provided a way to give patients more expensive treatments without requiring the NHS to fund them.
One of the drugs labelled as too expensive is Kadcyla, a breast cancer therapy drug which extends life by an average of six months at the cost of £90,000 a course.
55,000 people a year used the £200m-a-year fund for treatments that extended their lives.
Cancer charities are deeply concerned by the news.