Free at the Point of Use

An eighty-eight-year-old man, who was a pilot in the Second World War and has thus earned the sympathy of the British press, is being denied NHS treatment to save his sight. He is having to sell his house in order to pay for a course of injections because the local primary care trust says he does not qualify for free drugs. Apparently the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (aka the Corporate Relational Acronym People) "has not issued final guidelines on the relevant treatments", and the trust has decided upon a liberal interpretation of a thoughtful dictum by Patsy Hackitt, the Patients' Friend, that the lack of guidelines "should not be a bar" to patients receiving drugs. "We have been trying to get the criteria that they use but they're very elusive about this," the beneficiary said, adding uncharitably: "We suspect the older you are the less inclined they are to pay for you."