Health Bill [HL]

I sympathise with the intention behind the amendment, as has every Member of the Committee who has spoken, as it encourages patients to finish their prescribed medicines and to realise the value for money they are getting from the NHS. As noble Lords might anticipate, there are several significant reasons that lead me to believe that this amendment should be rejected. The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, is completely consistent in his view, and I do not believe for one minute that anyone would put him up to anything. He will remember the debate he had with my noble friend Lord Warner on this issue during the passage of the Health Bill 2006. My noble friend’s greatest concern related to patient attitudes to price labels. He promised that the issue would be taken forward with a proper study, and that study took place. I recently wrote to the noble Lord, so that he could read the detailed findings of the research. For the benefit of the Committee, the research question was whether people would continue to waste such high levels of medicines if they were aware of their actual cost. The researchers looked specifically at the effect of pricing information on medicine labels. Qualitative research, in the form of focus groups, took place as well as a literature review. It clearly showed that labelling medicines with prices has significant challenges. The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, will have seen from the detailed findings how complex this issue is. The first key point is that it showed the risk that the noble Lord’s amendment could present to patients who need their medicines to treat their medical condition effectively. We would not want to deter such patients from taking their medicine because they fear being a burden on the NHS if the price of their medicine is particularly high. That is particularly an issue for older patients. I can think of several of my own acquaintance who would be horrified if they knew that their medication costs the NHS thousands of pounds a year, as referred to by my noble friend.