HOW does our society measure the value of a medicine? Does the person that a medicine treats make up a part of its perceived worth? For example, is the remainder of an elderly person's life worth as much as a teenager's? What about a man's life compared with a woman's? Now how about a person on benefits compared with a person who pays income tax. When we consider a medicine's value, should we be asking whose life is worth more? This is a debate that has been thrown into the limelight by comments made to The Times this week by the chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, Andrew Dillon. It would seem NICE is refusing to go along with plans proposed by the Department of Health, which would see the "wider societal benefit" of a medicine considered during its assessment. Sir Andrew accuses the DH of adopting a "hard-nosed economic" approach.
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