Word: nicely
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...wall of Sir Michael Rawlins' office in London is a cartoon of a group of men in suits cowering below a giant circular pill inscribed with the word pharma. Amid the supplicants strides an impervious figure from Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) with a puzzled look on his face. Like the man in the cartoon, NICE head Rawlins doesn't see why drug companies should deserve any deference. His organization uses hard-nosed cost-effectiveness reviews to decide which treatments Britain's National Health Service (NHS) should pay for. A new drug doesn't just...
...NICE needed? Shouldn't you get the drugs you need when you are sick, regardless of cost? All health-care systems are facing the problem of finite resources and almost infinite demand. And all health-care systems have implicitly if not explicitly adopted some form of cost control. In the U.S. you do it by not providing health care to some people. We are best known [for looking] at a new drug, device or diagnostic technique to see whether the increment in the cost of that treatment is worth the increment in the health gain. (See pictures of health care...
...doesn't NICE take into account other factors in its cost-effectiveness review, such as lost productivity to the workforce? The quick answer is that our statutory instruments specify that we [should not]. But if you give advantage to people who are economically active, it means you disadvantage the economically inactive - the elderly. That's something that British society would find difficult to accept...
...seems like NICE is forcing pharmaceuticals to play ball by offering special discounts to Britain. How do you manage that? Our list price is used as a reference price in other countries, so drug companies believe that a no from NICE is damaging globally. So they set up what we call "patient-access schemes." Drug companies may either give away certain portions of treatment [such as the last few doses of a course] or reimburse the NHS for those patients who don't respond, which has the effect of reducing the price of the drug and lowering the cost...
...thrill for us, after playing in front of some pretty rough crowds,” Walsh said. “It was so nice to hear the ‘Let’s go Harvard’ chants...