Cancer drugs costing £50billion will crush the NHS, says expert

The high cost of cancer drugs could lead the Health Service into meltdown, a medical expert has warned.

Professor Karol Sikora said the next generation of drugs would keep patients alive longer, but could swallow half of the current NHS budget within four years.

He calculated that they could cost £50billion a year.

The professor, who is director of Cancer Partners UK, a private provider of cancer services that works with the NHS, came up with the figures for Sky News.

He said: '£50billion is the equivalent to raising tax by 15p for everybody. That's the bottom line. The calculations I've done show a pretty bleak picture unless we have drastic change.

'The NHS is going to face meltdown just because of one disease, so we're going to have to restructure things for the future, look at new ways of bringing money into the health service and that is a huge political challenge.'

The professor's intervention comes after a highly controversial proposal by the Government's rationing body last month to ban four life-extending kidney cancer drugs.

There are growing calls for reform of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), from influential voices such as The Lancet medical journal.

At the same time, there is increasing pressure on the Government to remove a restriction on patients who pay privately for drugs, which prevents them getting free NHS treatment at the same time. A review into this 'co-payment' issue is due to report in the autumn.

Professor Sikora, who is professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College London, is critical of ad hoc arrangements being made to try to get new cancer drugs into the NHS.

Last month he said they showed 'what a mess we're making'.

'There must be a freeing up of restrictions on NHS treatment to which a patient is entitled simply because they decided to buy a drug. I don't believe voters will let it continue.'

Professor Sikora said the UK was spending roughly the same amount on cancer per head as the rest of Europe, but there are ten new cancer drugs routinely available in Boulogne that cannot be prescribed on the NHS in Brighton.

He argued that the legal and moral position of the NHS was unsustainable, particularly given the actual words of William Beveridge, the architect of the NHS, which supported free choice for patients. He said: 'It makes no sense to stop people topping up NHS treatment in a bid to improve their health.

'We don't stop people spending their own money on living more healthily, buying more expensive food for example, so why on earth is the NHS trying to make patients pay for everything if they choose to buy the latest drugs?

'We need to make the NHS efficient and completely equitable so all patients get a core service which they can add to with a top-up payment. There is no other solution.'

NICE chairman Sir Michael Rawlins, told Sky News that his organisation is unfairly seen as nasty.

He said: 'Rationing is a necessary evil. We have to do it. There will be losers and winners. And the loser will always think they have been badly treated. And I am sorry about that.'

He added: 'There is a finite pot of money and it is a matter of how we divide it up in the fairest possible way.'

However, critics including the Commons health select committee point out that NICE has not yet looked at how the NHS can 'disinvest' - stop using - treatments that do not work or are not value for money.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said NICE's decision-making was 'not about affordability in the short-term'.

'It is about whether the claims of pharmaceutical companies are backed by the evidence and a careful judgment about what represents value for taxpayers' money,' he said.