An English cancer patient who has spent £5,000 on a wonderdrug denied by the NHS is set to move 300 miles to Scotland where the treatment is free.
Grandmother Carol Rummels, 60, was given two months to live with brain and lung cancer last year but is still alive thanks to the drug Tarceva.
It is deemed too expensive for use in England so Carol and husband Bruce have used their life savings to buy the drug, which has helped halve the size of her lung tumour.
But they could be forced to sell their £280,000 home of 34 years and move to Scotland if a last-ditch plea for funding fails.
It probably wouldn’t have made such a good headline for "The World’s Greatest Newspaper", but Tarceva is also free in Cumbria and the North-East.
Which, I know, is not really the main point here.
If there was only one part of the devolution experiment, I would be able to reverse, it would be this.
The power to levy different hospital car-parking costs or buffet prices could stay with the devolved administrations, but a National Health Service should mean exactly that- the same level of care should be guaranteed to anyone, wherever they may be living in that nation- otherwise it is obviously no longer a National health service.
5 comments:
Don't worry, we still have a National Health Service, in fact we now have four of them. The National Health Service of Wales, the National Health Service of England, the National Health Service of Scotland and the National Health Service of Northern Ireland - 4 for the price of 1 ;-)
I guess that fighting long lost batlles is something anti-devolutionists are having to get used to (don't worry, nationalists have for decades had to suffer fighting what was thought to be unwinnable battles - just shows how times change)
Being able to run our health and eduation services as we think best is what devolution is all about. "One size fits all" has never worked.
I guess that fighting long lost batlles is something anti-devolutionists are having to get used to (don't worry, nationalists have for decades had to suffer fighting what was thought to be unwinnable battles - just shows how times change)
It's the weakest point of the whole devolved system and its certainly a battle which has been long lost- people don't really care about the constitutional inequities of assymetrical devolution, start mucking about with their social services and you're going to get a reaction.
people don't really care about the constitutional inequities of assymetrical devolution
You do realise that anything but assymetrical devolution would not in fact be devolution don't you?
Symetrical devolution would be exactly like what we had pre 1999, just with a hell of a lot of politicans being paid to do nothing!
Symetrical devolution would be exactly like what we had pre 1999, just with a hell of a lot of politicans being paid to do nothing!
Excuse me for being thick, but symetrical devolution would surely mean all units within the whole getting the same level of power from the centre as is the case in Germany, Australia? That wasn't the case when we were all under Westminster?
And as opposed to pre 1999, we have even more politicians being paid to do nothing now!!
Fair enough, I thought you were still on your original point of having the NHS the same everywhere (i.e. symetrical)
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