Unsurprising

Like New Zealand, the UK has a public health service. Like New Zealand, that system assesses whether pharmaceuticals are cost-effective and worth providing on the public tab. And like New Zealand, grassroots patient groups mount vocal protests whenever their favoured treatment isn't fully funded.

Except they're not grassroots at all. Instead, they're largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry:

The National Kidney Federation (NKF) accused Nice [the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, which makes funding decisions] of taking a "barbaric, damaging and unacceptable" decision when it turned down four kidney cancer drugs for NHS use this year and pledged to campaign against the decision. It did not criticise the cost of the drugs, at more than £3,000 for a 30-tablet pack. Half the NKF's £300,000 budget comes from the pharmaceutical and renal industries.

The Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Alliance (Arma) organised a protest letter from 10 professors of rheumatology, published in The Sunday Times last month, over a recent Nice decision to restrict access to arthritis drugs. The letter made no mention of the cost of the drugs but Ros Meek, chief executive, admitted that "half, or more" of the charity's £147,000 income came from the drug industry.

The National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society described the same Nice decision as "another nail in the coffin" for arthritis treatment and launched an appeal against it this week, with Arma and three drug companies. The society received 49 per cent of its £300,000 budget from the pharmaceutical industry in 2005-06, reducing to 26 per cent of its £472,000 budget in 2006-07.

The list goes on, but you get the picture. Public advocacy groups are being funded as marketing by an industry seeking higher profits through guaranteed sales, as an end run around having to prove their products are cost-effective. The public are the overall losers, as scarce health funding is diverted to drugs with better marketing, rather than those which will save more lives.

All of which makes you wonder whether this is going on with the local Herceptin campaign...