Are expensive drugs worth it? Rolling out new medicines may be too costly to other patients' health

New medicines can be a lifeline for millions of patients – but over two decades in England, public spending on them came with significant trade-offs that indicate the money paid for new drugs may be better used on other health services, a new analysis has found.

Once England’s National Institute for Care and Excellence (NICE) recommends a new drug for patients, the National Health Service (NHS) must pay for it, if it’s prescribed by a doctor.

But with a limited budget, NHS spending on new drugs means other health services won’t be funded – and this isn’t always considered when policymakers and health professionals weigh the cost-effectiveness of new medicines, according to the study in the Lancet medical journal.

With that gap in mind, the researchers from UK and US universities modelled how this trade-off shapes the health of England’s population overall.

"We know patients are deriving benefits from new drugs, but that comes at a cost to others in society who may have to forego access to services because funding has to be reallocated to paying for drugs rather than anything else," Huseyin Naci, an associate professor of health policy at the London School of Economics and the study’s lead author, told Euronews Health.

"They are the invisible people who are losing out as a result of explicitly prioritising the health benefits we get from drugs".

Other analyses have shown that, on average, it costs about £15,000 (€18,000) to pay for one year of health, a measure known as quality-adjusted life years (QALYs).

The researchers used that figure to estimate the number of healthy years that could essentially be bought with the £75.1 billion (€90.2 billion) the NHS spent on new drugs between 2000 and 2020, if the funding had instead been