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Healthcare Budgets Are Shrinking All The Time, But Is It Realistically More Cost Effective To Pay For Long Term Medication As Opposed To Paying For Life Changing Operations Now?

16th March, 2011 - Posted by health news - No Comments

A little research shows that, despite cost reduction attitudes inside the NHS, the healthcare standard in the UK is keeping a higher percentage of us alive for longer. A great deal has been mentioned about the financial ramifications of an increasingly old population in respect of pension expenses and an increase in care needs as more people live into old age and have age related health difficulties which mean that they have to be cared for by the state.

Whilst fully understanding of the difficulties that the NHS is dealing with, I often wonder if some of their practices are more like false economies. Yes, we all know that operations are costly, but if a health problem can be dealt with by operating and the effects then stop the patient from requiring any additional medical care for that issue for a few years, surely the two treatment options should be compared to each other.

Let me describe a genuine example. I have a colleague who is aged mid thirties and who suffers with severe arthritis in both knee joints. By severe, I can confirm that she is in constant pain, has difficulty walking upstairs, can only walk very small distances very slowly and is therefore registered as disabled by the government. Her situation could be solved by an operation to provide replacement knee joints, but the authorities refuse to even contemplate that until she reaches her mid fifties. This is due to the fact that the replacement joints do not last forever, so apparently for this reason they will not contemplate doing this operation twice on the same person because it costs too much.

But let’s think about how much she will cost the state instead. There will be a need for a further two decades of pain killing medication, and a further two decades of appointments seeing a specialist to keep an eye on the worsening of the pain. And because she is disabled she is limited as to the nature of work she can do and therefore doesn’t earn much, the state will be funding twenty years supply of drugs for her (for this problem plus her other health complaints), plus providing another twenty years of disability living allowance, and free road tax on the motor car that she gets around in. Now, I have no clue as tohow much the total to fund the operation would be as against all of these numerous expenses, but twenty years worth of car tax alone would be a sizeable deposit to start paying for some new knee joints.

A similar situation must be applicable to many other people who have knee and hip complaints. Obviously, it would cost money now, but the potential savings to the NHS over quite a few years afterwards, coupled with a much better quality of life for the patient has to surely be something worth considering.

There is a similar scenario in the domain of eye care where Laser eye surgery is still pretty much carried out in the private sector and only occasionally offered to NHS patients who experience the most common eye complaints such as short-sightedness and long-sightedness. A patient will generally get their eyes tested every year or two, and will almost certainly need new glasses quite often. In general for older folk, where the glasses are quite likely going to be partly financed by the NHS, there must surely be a case for providing one course of Laser eye treatment which could then potentially last them for the rest of their lives, in particular when Laser eye surgery is such a simple procedure to carry out.

I’m sure that there are many examples of healthcare processes where the initial funding of treatment precludes their use in all but very unusual cases, which is a shame for those who have to suffer. Maybe someone could invent a ready reckoner that could prove or otherwise the benefits of financing new joints now compared to twenty years of the costs mentioned above, or of one Laser eye treatment appointment as against many pairs of glasses.