thetorydiary

Protecting NHS spending is something to which David Cameron committed a future Conservative Government some time ago and he and George Osborne have remained steadfast in their commitment to doing so, despite the economic situation in which we find ourselves.

Today sees the first translation of that pledge into a specific promise to offer to voters at the election - namely to provide better treatments against cancer, something which even those who have been sceptical about ring-fencing the NHS budget ought to see as a good doorstep-ready policy.

It has already been reported this morning that the Conservatives believe that more anti-cancer drugs need to be available on the NHS.

Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley was quoted by the BBC as saying:

"We've got to arrive at a point where people who have a cancer, who know there is a new cancer medicine that sometimes is clearly shown to extend life, or improve the quality of life, and their prospects, that those drugs are going to be available on the NHS."

Now the party has revealed how it would enable this to happen in government: as is well documented, the party will raise the threshold for Employers National Insurance Contributions, which will free up £200 million from the NHS budget every year. A Conservative Government would use that money to create a Cancer Drugs Fund to ensure that no cancer patient is refused access to drugs that have been licensed since 2005 if their doctors say they need them.

There are many examples of anti-cancer drugs which have been certified as safe, but which the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has refused to make available on the NHS due to cost. So the money from the Cancer Drugs Fund will be added to the NHS tariff in order to pay for the extra cost of those drugs, meaning that doctors will be able to prescribe them without needing to apply to their Primary Care Trust for funding.

Furthermore, the Conservatives are pledging that by 2014 a Tory Government will have reformed the way drug companies are paid for NHS medicines by moving to a value-based pricing system - so that effective treatments are made available through the NHS, with drug providers paid according to the value of their new treatments.

This would be a shift away from from the existing system of price control and profit cap through the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme, which the Office of Fair Trading has concluded is not providing good value for patients.

3.30pm update:

David Cameron has made the following statement about the policy:

"We have a problem in Britain that other European countries are doing better than us at giving people longer, happier lives with cancer than we are. So we want to get more drugs to people more quickly and in the UK today there are some people, thousands of people, who want a certain cancer drug whose doctors tell them they should have a certain cancer drug who don't get it. 

"So we are saying because we are not going ahead with this National Insurance increase, that will save the NHS money and we are going to put that money into a cancer drugs fund. So these thousands of people who want a drug whose doctors would like them to have a drug can get that drug."

Jonathan Isaby

The Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling has seized on a ComRes poll of 150 MPs - including 44 Tory MPs - that appears to show much greater support for tax relief for private medical care among Tory MPs than any other party.  Mr Darling said the Tories were two-faced on the NHS.

66% of the 44 Tory MPs questioned said they supported tax relief on standard rate income tax for private medical insurance.  Just 1% of Labour and 5% of the Liberal Democrat MPs were of the same opinion.  The Telegraph notes that "Two thirds of Conservatives, 6 per cent, said that patients should be able to receive treatment part paid for by the NHS and part privately funded, as against 36 per cent of Lib Dems and 14 per cent of Labour MPs."

Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley dismissed the survey - saying that most Tory MPs did not answer the survey.  He told Sky News:

"We want to arrive at a position where nobody feels they need private medical insurance in order to have access to good quality healthcare."

Many socialists have long used exactly that argument for removing support for private schools.  It's a bad argument and it is actually the existence of an escape route from the NHS - as would have been provided by the Patient's Passport (a commitment abolished by David Cameron) - that forces the state sector to raise its performance.

POSTSCRIPT

Sky News' headline above their coverage of the story is entirely inappropriate.  The Tories reputation on the NHS is not close to being in tatters.  A poll only yesterday found that 39% agreed that 'the NHS would be safer under Labour than the Conservatives' BUT 47% disagreed.  This latest Sky error follows on from Sky Political Editor Adam Boulton's unnecessarily personal attack on Dan Hannan.

Tim Montgomerie

Earlier today David Cameron explained why rising costs and new treatments meant he had pledged the next Conservative government to spend more than Labour on the NHS in coming years. The Tories are committed to above-inflation increases for twelve reasons.  The twelve points below are quotations from David Cameron's speech:

1. There are now more pensioners than under 16s: The biggest pressure is of course our ageing population. The fastest growing age group in Britain today is those aged 80 years and over. For the first time ever there are more pensioners in this country than there are children under 16.
2. The growth of long-term conditions: As people live longer they're more likely to live for more of their life with at least one long-term condition like Diabetes, Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's.  It's estimated that by 2025 over six million older people will be suffering from a debilitating long-term illness.  The number of people with dementia will have increased to around one million; with osteoporosis to over four million; with hearing loss to around ten million. These are increases of up to fifty per cent from today.
3. Lifestyle illnesses are increasingly expensive: While we're living longer we're also becoming less healthy in many ways.   Obesity, drug and alcohol abuse and sexual health problems are all on the rise, putting massive pressure on NHS resources.  Alcohol misuse costs the NHS £2.7 billion a year.  Obesity is estimated to cost it a staggering £4 billion a year.
4. Infectious diseases like swine flu: There are still big infectious diseases to fight - and not just the sporadic scares like swine flu.
5. The return of TB: Tuberculosis is an ever-growing pressure on our health service. We used to think TB was a disease of the 19th century, not a threat to the twenty-first but the number of cases has increased by 25 per cent since the turn of the millennium.
6. HIV infection rates: HIV is the fastest-growing serious health problem in the UK, with an estimated 80,000 people living with it.
7. 200,000 to 400,000 people with Hepatitis C: And perhaps the most shocking rise in modern disease has been Hepatitis C - since 1997 the number of cases reported each year has almost trebled. While the latest official figures show that 60,000 people in England have been infected, the Department of Health estimates that the real figure is more like 200,000. But the Hepatitis C Trust believes that you can double that number - with nearer 400,000 people in England being infected.
8. Robot and nanotechnologies: Today, medical advances, driven by the hi-tech revolution, are increasing at an exponential rate. Genetics, nanotechnology and robotics are being integrated into the work of the NHS. Da vinci robots, costing millions, are routinely used for pelvic surgery. Microscopic robots that can be injected into veins to perform minor procedures from the inside.
9. Possibilities of genetic diagnosis: Those at risk of inherited disease may be referred for genetic diagnosis by their GP, at a cost of £5,000 a time.
10. Stents costing £60,000-a-time: Patients undergoing operations might have stents - tubes like internal medical scaffolding - put into their airways and blood vessels, with a hand-made stent for the aortic arch costing £60,000 alone.
11. Brain-controlled artificial limbs: Right now scientists are working on artificial limbs that are controlled by thought alone.
12. Diagnostic breathalyzers: Breathalyzers that can diagnose disease with one puff.

I readily agree that it is a persuasive list but it would also be possible to draw up similar lists for many other public sector budgets - budgets that have not enjoyed the growth of resources enjoyed by the NHS.

My greater objection, however, is the question of affordability.  Britain borrowed £8bn last month against an expected borrowing requirement of £500m.  The BBC reports that the government's overall debt now stands at £801bn, or 56.8% of GDP, its highest level since at least 1974.  As I blogged earlier: For all the rhetoric about the cupboard being bare and an age of austerity the reluctance of the Tory leadership to make difficult decisions is becoming worrying.

Tim Montgomerie

WATCH: David Cameron tells Bolton audience that the Tories are now the party of the NHS