Britain’s Alzheimer’s Betrayal: How Westminster Just Put a Price Tag on Your Memories
Two breakthrough dementia drugs that could buy precious time are off the NHS menu — unless you fancy selling your house. It’s time to roar, not whimper.
Brace yourself dear reader, because I’m about to drag you into a story so infuriating it should come with a blood pressure warning and a complimentary stress ball. Three years ago my family lost someone very close to us, due to Alzheimer’s. It’s a disease so cruel it makes cancer look like a minor inconvenience involving a lost sock. Watching someone you love slip behind a locked door of confusion and fear is an experience I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy; and I once had someone sneakily swap my sugar for salt whilst filming The Great British Bake Off. You get my point!
So imagine my unholy delight this week when our beloved NHS decided to politely slam the door on not one but two shiny, proven Alzheimer’s drugs.
Brace yourselves folks… If you get a thrill from watching half your wages vanish into Westminster’s bottomless pit of cock-ups while they somehow still refuse to fund the one thing that might stop your mum thinking you’re some stranger who came to read the meter, then buckle up; you’re living the dream!
These drugs, lecanemab and donanemab, which sound like fancy pastries only a Michelin-starred baker could pronounce; have actually been shown to slow Alzheimer’s in its tracks. Not cure it mind you. No one’s promising a fairytale ending. But a few extra months of clarity, a few more Sundays where Mum remembers your name, your birthday and the fact you hate potatoes? Priceless. Or in the NHS’s case, precisely £20,000 a year, plus change for a scan and a doctor who might eventually look up from their clipboard.
Except Nice, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence; and yes irony is officially dead… have declared it not cost-effective. So sorry, Nana, you’ll just have to unravel quietly while someone signs off another minister’s expense claim for a second home and duck house.
Forgive my profanity but this is, to use my best GCSE French, absolutely bloody ridiculous… and at best immoral!
Meanwhile, if you’ve got sixty grand rattling around in your coin jar, you can pop to a private clinic and bag yourself an infusion. This country now treats dementia like an optional add-on for the well-heeled. A leather upgrade on your brain, available only if you’re prepared to remortgage the conservatory. Everyone else? Kindly wait your turn to forget your own address.
It’s a familiar British theme, this business of being refused what you desperately need. Like queuing up for hours at the Post Office only to be told the one counter that does passports is closed for lunch until Thursday. Or spending fifteen years paying National Insurance so you can be told you’re too healthy, too sick, too old, too alive or too dead to qualify for anything remotely useful.
Also don’t get me started on the so-called “cost-effectiveness” argument. Let’s do the maths, shall we? Alzheimer’s already costs the UK economy about £25 billion a year. That’s billion with a B. Family carers, lost working hours, hospital beds bunged up with patients who don’t know why they’re there but can still recite the Queen’s Coronation by heart. But sure, Nice, let’s save a few quid now so we can haemorrhage a fortune later.
Meanwhile other countries, America, Australia, Japan, even South Korea have said, “Yes please, we’ll take a chance on giving people a few more precious memories, thank you very much.” Britain? We’ll just write a strongly worded memo and hope the problem politely toddles off into the night, humming Vera Lynn I suspect…
I could spit.
But spitting doesn’t change a damn thing. What does change things is noise, the sort of righteous, kitchen-table fury that makes MPs twitch and civil servants drop their coffee. So here’s my challenge to you… phone your MP, email Nice, yell at the local health board, or bellow from your front doorstep; or just repost this column if that’s all you can do. Because one day it might be your mum, your dad, your brother, your sister; or even you looking blankly at the clock and wondering why nobody bothered to fight.
So fight. Make noise. Refuse to be refused. Because our memories are worth more than any spreadsheet can ever calculate.
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Chris Geiger, Author of The Cancer Survivors Club.
Daily Dose of Disbelief!
Bsky: @chrisgeiger.com
Bsky: @thecancersurvivorsclub.com
Bsky: @dailydoseofdisbelief.com
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