Dave B wrote:I notice there is a lower cost limit here. What about the quids charged for generic drugs that cost pennies?
Will this cause some to not continue to take necessary medicine. It will affect the old and timid more than the couldn't-care-less types that probably cause much of the waste.
Precisely. Hunt will have been the cause of death.
As usual, there would appear to be not a jot of evidence that this jolly jape of his will save any of w
The Independent article says:
It follows a study, commissioned by the Government, which found that wasted medicines cost the NHS £300m a year.
This represents around £1 in every £25 spent on drugs in primary care and 0.3 per cent of total NHS outlays. The figure includes around £9m worth of unused prescription medicines that are left in people’s homes, £110m returned to community pharmacies over the course of a year, and £50m worth of NHS supplied medicines disposed of unused by care homes.
So he did a study that came up with the figure of £300 million. The Independent calls this 'wasted medicines cost' and this amounted to 4% of the (primary care) drugs budget and 0.3% of the total NHS cost. Of this, £169 million, are medicines that were unused. It's not clear where the other £131 million comes from. What this idiot seems to ignore is that there are frequently very good reasons for not using all medicines prescribed to you: some are prescribed as take as required; conditions improve; a doctor prescribes a lower/higher dose or a different drug as your condition changes; people die. So there is a possibility that much of this £169 million is unavoidable 'waste' There might be a case for reviewing pack sizes or doctors prescribing less at a time, but it looks like that would, at most, save a tiny fraction of this number.
Then, as you say, there are the (unintended) consequences. As the article points out, some drugs cost thousands of pounds a year and there at least seems the possibility that some people will baulk at the cost and not take them; not return to their GP; and possibly not return them to their pharmacist. These are conceivable and foreseeable harms and unless Hunt has evidence this will never happen - or that not many will suffer or die as a result - then he's callous as well as stupid and ignorant.