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London: A black market in cancer drugs could be created if the government fails to allow patients to "top up" their National Health Service (NHS) treatment, health experts warned yesterday.
It adds to increasing pressure on ministers to allow patients to spend their own cash on drugs not funded by the health service.
The country's leading cancer specialists were meeting in London yesterday to discuss whether patients should be allowed to pay extra for medication not deemed cost effective by health watchdog Nice.
It is part of an urgent government review of how it deals with patients who pay privately for extra drugs. Currently patients who do so are forced to pay for the NHS care they would otherwise have received for free, making it impossible for all but the richest patients to afford.
Karol Sikora, professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College, urged the Government to relax the rules.
Hardline ideology
He said: "We have to allow them. We can't take people's care away because they choose to do something extra. We have to get more money into healthcare and it is unlikely that it will come from tax only. If we try to make it illegal, people will just do it secretly and not tell their doctors. There will be a black market in cancer drugs. The Government will have to liberate this. The hardline ideology just won't stand up."
In the NHS Confederation's official response to the review, it said most of its members oppose top-up treatments because of the injustice to those who cannot afford them, but realise this is "almost certainly not sustainable".
The meeting follows a number of high profile cases where terminally ill patients have been denied life-extending drugs. On Wednesday, a cancer patient with months to live won a High Court battle for a life-prolonging drug.
Colin Ross, 55, mounted a legal challenge to his NHS Trust's refusal to fund treatment. Judge Simon Grenfell overturned a former decision that the new drug Revlimid would not be cost-effective.
Ross, from Horsham, West Sussex, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer of the blood cells, in May 2004.
If he had been living in neighbouring East Sussex he said he would have received the drug.
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