Actually even NHS has a limit for the amount they'll spend on your treatment over time. It's rare to hit it, but any system that's trying to allocate the scare resource of medical treatment will have to stop a minority of very sick people from receiving all the resources.
Actually, the NHS doesn't have any per-patient treatment limit. They have a limit on which treatments are available on the NHS at all based on the cost-benefit ratio, which works out somewhere around £20,000 to £30,000 per quality-adjusted year of life. So people aren't forced to stop chemotherapy early, but they might be prescribed a chemotherapy drug that's slightly less effective than the very best but much cheaper. (We're generally talking very small claimed benefits, even in the studies done by the expensive drug's manufacturer to try and promote it - a lot of expensive new chemo drugs are just not that good.)
What's the financial limit? I haven't heard that before.
I know there's the NICE guidance, and then what a CCG will pay for, and what the cancer drugs fund will pay for. But those decisions almost always are about cost-effective, and not just cost.
Good point. Even if your health insurance is public, someone, somewhere is figuring out what can and can't be paid for.
One of the reasons other countries spend less on healthcare, compared to the US, is that they just don't pay for certain things (drugs, procedures, etc). The US is a bit more lax when it comes to this and that results in higher costs.
In Canada, we have a drug insurance tax (in Quebec at least, I'm unsure if this is a federal thing) so we clearly pay for drugs. I don't know the extent of what we do pay for, but surgeries and most everything is paid for by taxes.
Even breast reduction is covered if a doctor judges that it's for health reasons.
You pay for production. All of the research cost and business risk in going to market with the drug in the first place is paid by Americans. You're welcome.
