At last, NICE to take over the Cancer Drugs Fund

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) celebrates its 17th birthday in April. By any standards it must be judged to have been one of the more successful pieces of public policy in the past couple of decades.

It has shielded politicians from many of the really difficult decisions about what the NHS should and should not provide. It has made cost effectiveness, as opposed to purely clinical effectiveness, a key part of that. And—amid repeated controversies—it has sought with considerable success to balance an essentially unequal equation. One between the interests of the taxpayer in cost effectiveness; the interests of individual patients, who when they are not paying simply want …