Putting a price on life - meningitis B vaccine refused by UK

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

Article from the Beeb on today's announcement...so sad that life and health are a commodity that needs to be justified on 'cost' basis.

Bacterial meningitis is perhaps the most feared of all childhood infections in Britain. It can kill or disable within hours of symptoms emerging.
So it may seem bizarre, even illogical, that the body that advises the government on immunisation should not recommend the introduction of a vaccine against the most common cause of the disease.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has decided that a vaccine against meningitis B (MenB) is simply not cost-effective.
The vaccine has taken 20 years to develop and was licensed throughout Europe in January. Health committees in France and Spain are also considering the vaccine but no other country has yet recommended its introduction.
The JCVI is the vaccine equivalent of NICE, the body that advises the NHS on new medicines. Given that NHS resources are finite, each committee has to decide whether a new product is cost-effective. This is done by using an internationally recognised system known as quality-adjusted life years (QALY). (http://www.nice.org.uk/newsroom/features/measuringeffectivenessandcosteffectivenesstheqaly. jsp)
A QALY is an assessment of how many extra months or years of life of a reasonable quality a person might gain as a result of a treatment.
To be cost-effective, any new vaccine, cancer medicine or heart treatment should cost no more than £20-30,000 for every QALY it saves.
The JCVI has concluded that the MenB vaccine did not meet the economic criteria at any level. In other words, introducing the vaccine would not be a good use of limited NHS resources, which could be better spent elsewhere.
In January a European Commission-funded study (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21170445) concluded that the QALY system of assessing new treatments was flawed.
The announcement from the JCVI will provoke anger and dismay from charities and families affected by the disease. They will argue that the committee has not adequately assessed the appalling lifelong burden of meningitis.

(BBC News - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-23411202)

[precarian]

Disgraceful. "Cost effective" medicine! Always nice to be reminded of how highly the administrators of capitalism value the lives of their wage slaves..

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Cost-benefit analysis is an arsehole of a tool.

[MarxSchmarx]

This actually raises a relevant question however.

Irrespective of the shittyness of this outcome, one thing I wonder about is the opportunity cost argument here. Presumably not funding this vaccine means that the more lives are saved somewhere else. My guess is this problem will not go away the day after we abolish capitalism. The question is, if not by some variant of cost-benefit analyses, how do we propose to allocate finite resources for something like healthcare? FOr the record, I think even if we expropriated all the wealth in the world from the capitalists, there will still very likely be decisions like this that will have to be made on some level.

[piet11111]

This actually raises a relevant question however.

Irrespective of the shittyness of this outcome, one thing I wonder about is the opportunity cost argument here. Presumably not funding this vaccine means that the more lives are saved somewhere else. My guess is this problem will not go away the day after we abolish capitalism. The question is, if not by some variant of cost-benefit analyses, how do we propose to allocate finite resources for something like healthcare? FOr the record, I think even if we expropriated all the wealth in the world from the capitalists, there will still very likely be decisions like this that will have to be made on some level.

Agreed as bitter as it is to admit we would also have to resort to cost benefit analysis for medical treatments.

The thing that would change completely is that the costs would be much lower under socialism because we wont have to deal with market price gouging and provide medical care at the lowest possible cost.

Perhaps we could debate this better if we used a donor heart instead of money when it comes to discussing finite resources.

If we had 2 people requiring a donor heart and we only have one available to us then we shouldn't pick the 75 year old over the 25 year old.