51–60 of 64 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name the insurance companies in the US that cover this situation and what they cost per month. I’ll wait.
I hope you are not holding your breath as it looks like you are in for a long wait.
"It’s safe, it’s effective – it even works for aquagenic urticaria. This should be a happy ending. But there’s a catch. The asthma drug is currently being used “off-label”; that is, the effectiveness of the drug against urticaria hasn’t yet been demonstrated in a large-scale clinical trial. And most healthcare providers, from insurance companies to the UK’s NHS, simply won’t pay for drugs without one.
This is the problem Rachel encountered back in 2014, when the specialist in Berlin recommended omalizumab. At the moment, the drug would set her back around a thousand euros per month.
But finding enough patients for a trial could be problematic. Aquagenic urticaria affects around one in every 230 million people. By that estimate, there are only 32 people with the condition on the entire planet. “We are a big team here, we see more than 2,000 new urticaria patients every year. And we have three with aquagenic urticaria,” says Maurer.
To complicate matters further, the drug is coming to the end of its patent. With so little time left to make any money out of it – and a handful of potential customers – convincing the company to invest in a trial would be extremely difficult. “I’m not sure that we will see such a trial,” he says. Novartis, who market the drug as Xolair for asthma and other conditions, confirm they have no plans to develop the treatment for aquagenic urticaria. "We believe that the unlicensed use of drugs should be limited to cases where there is an unmet medical need that cannot be fulfilled by licensed medications or as permitted by the regulatory framework designed to protect patient safety," their spokesperson adds. After decades of research to solve the mystery disease, the final hurdle isn’t science, but economics."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Australia at least you can claim a tax rebate if you have private health insurance. I imagine the UK would have a similar system.
In the UK, private insurance usually requires you to use the public health system as a first stage, and only fall back to the private one for things not covered by the NHS. So you don't get a tax rebate because you are still relying on the public system.
I don't think it is for things "not covered by the NHS". It depends on your level of coverage but typically you would go to the NHS first and then invoke your private coverage when you have a diagnosis in order the eg skip the queue.
When a relative had a heart attack, he was put on a waiting list for a heart bypass - 1 year. When he invoked insurance, he got seen within a month - by the same doctor and in the same facility as it would have been on NHS.
In a lot of instances the private health care system is just paying the public one for advantageous access to services.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For some reason, lots of writers seem to feel that useless pictures are better than no pictures. I see this all the time with programming blog posts too; they’ll stick some stock art of HTML or a computer on a desk or something like that. With news it’s not just burning through my data plan but sometimes it can be actively misleading, like when they pick a picture to represent something but it’s not the actual thing…
This got me thinking of articles by Joel Spolsky. Here is an example: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Text-wise his articles are often very interesting though.
> you can ask almost any programmer today about the code they are working on. “It’s a big hairy mess,” they will tell you. “I’d like nothing better than to throw it out and start over.”
> Why is it a mess?
> “Well,” they say, “look at this function. It is two pages long! None of this stuff belongs in there! I don’t know what half of these API calls are for.”
> Before Borland’s new spreadsheet for Windows shipped, Philippe Kahn, the colorful founder of Borland, was quoted a lot in the press bragging about how Quattro Pro would be much better than Microsoft Excel, because it was written from scratch. All new source code! As if source code rusted.
> Back to that two page function. Yes, I know, it’s just a simple function to display a window, but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I’ll tell you why: those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes that bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes that bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the disk in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95.
The article is from 2016. It appears the drug has since been approved for treatment of urticaria - https://www.xolair.com/ciu/why-consider-xolair/about-ciu-tre...
The article refers to the British healthcare system.
> For Rachel, diving into this pool would be like swimming in potent bleach I find this choice of analogy really interesting, since diving into the pool is like swimming in bleach for everyone else too.
I like the fact that the BBC felt compelled to add pictures to this story at all, for the benefit of readers who might be unfamiliar with what a swimming pool or glass of water would look like.
If the drug's patent is about to expire, doesn't that mean generics will soon be available and the high-cost problem will be solved through competition?
> For Rachel, diving into this pool would be like swimming in potent bleach I find this choice of analogy really interesting, since diving into the pool is like swimming in bleach for everyone else too.