This is Nikki Phelps.
This is Nikki's family.
Bill Phelps, Nikki's husband, and her two boys -- Harry and Jack -- watched Nikki waste away and die from kidney cancer.
Tragically, Nikki's form of cancer was treatable with a drug called Sutent. But Nikki's health insurer repeatedly denied her the drug, claiming it was too expensive.
Who was this despicable health insurer? Was it Anthem, Blue Cross, Humana? No, it was none of those companies.
Nikki Phelp's insurer was was Britain's National Health Service (NHS), the model for Barack Obama and his hand-picked appointment for the head of Medicare, Donald Berwick.
Donald Berwick loves the NHS and has said as much. He thinks it is doing a bang-up job and has praised its practices endlessly.Berwick was a recess appointment for his powerful post as President Obama knew that he would never have survived Senatorial confirmation because of his infamous, bizarre and blatantly socialist statements.
"I am romantic about the NHS; I love it. All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country... [it is] such a seductress... a global treasure."
"[Among] the primary functions [of health regulation is] to constrain decentralized, individual decision making [and] to weigh public welfare against the choices of private consumers."
"Please don’t put your faith in market forces... In the United States... competition is a major reason for our duplicative, supply-driven, fragmented care system."
Berwick has routinely mocked the very free market and private enterprise systems that produce 75% of all medical and pharmaceutical innovations on the planet. The breakthrough devices and drugs aren't coming from the U.K., a simple fact Berwick appears to have conveniently ignored.
Sutent, the very drug that could have saved Nikki Phelps, was manufactured by an American company. As are three-quarters of all pharmaceuticals.Worse, the UK's cancer survival rates are horrific compared to those of the United States.
• British cancer outcomes don't just trail U.S. results; "they rival those of Eastern European nations." A 2008 study showed that cancer survival rates in the U.K. trail far behind those of the United States. American men, for example, "have an 80 percent better chance of surviving prostate cancer than do their English counterparts... [and there are] similar disparities in comparative survival rates for victims of breast, colon and rectal cancers."• Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom.
• Some "56 percent of Americans who could benefit from statin drugs, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease, are taking them. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons, and 17 percent of Italians receive them."
• "British cancer patients are substantially more likely to die of the disease than those in other western European countries because of poor access to the latest drugs, according to an authoritative report to be published today." (Cancer survival rates worst in western Europe: Telegraph (UK) 2007)
This is the health care system that Barack Obama, Donald Berwick and the Democrat Party intend to emulate. No free market innovation. No competition. No initiative. Only government rationing with a monopolistic, single-payer in charge of all health care delivery.
Like East Germany in the Sixties.
November is our last chance to stop the kind of madness that killed Nikki Phelps.
Related: Nikki Phelps vs. Hymen Replacement Surgery. Hat tip: Tiger. Linked by: Don Surber. Thanks!
7 comments:
You say it was an "advanced and aggressive form" of kidney cancer. I'm sorry to say this, but if it was "sarcomatoid variant" kidney cancer (the most aggressive form) and if it was Stage IV (the most advanced stage), Sutent would NOT have saved her, it would only have prolonged her life a few months. I know this because this is what killed my beloved. The survival rate for Stage IV sarcomatoid renal cell carcinoma is virtually nil. In all the Web research I did to try to find something that might save my husband, I found only one case of a person who'd actually survived this form of the disease. She got written up in medical journals!
Sutent bought my husband three extra months of life--and I am grateful that I had those extra months with him--but to be honest, he was pretty darn miserable most of that time. And yes, like Nikki, he did literally waste away. That is what makes cancer so horrendous.
I do know a couple of people with kidney cancer who have had the disease for several years and are still working and active, thanks to Sutent--or its close relative, the drug Nexavar. But neither of these individuals has the sarcomatoid variant of the disease, which has an average survival time of 7 months from diagnosis till death.
I totally agree with you that the British NHS--and ObamaCare's death panels--are horrendous. I'm just saying that perhaps Nikki Phelps may not be the best example for the case we are trying to make.
Besides denial of access to drugs, one of the factors contributing to the higher cancer mortality in England is the same problem that we know Canada has: preposterously long waits to see a doctor. If kidney cancer, for example, is detected EARLY (Stage I or II), it is actually one of the easiest cancers to treat. However, if the cancer has advanced, undetected, it becomes one of the most difficult to treat--although the new generation of drugs that includes Sutent is helping a lot.
If the kidney cancer is so advanced that it has mutated into the "sarcomatoid variant," there is nothing, to my knowledge, that can save the patient's life. So the key, as with so many things, is early detection--something that becomes only more unlikely in a medical system that forces patients to wait for many weeks or months to see a doctor.
The logic is lost, as Democratic Partisans try to justify the insane push of disastrous Socialist FAILURE on a healthy USA.
The irony is vivid, as many Democrats in the MEDIA are celebrating the Clinton's Daughter getting married this weekend.
Hillary first tried to Nationalize US Health Care, and even HUGGED Nancy Pelosi for passing this mess we call Obamacare.
Yet, many still believe the Clintons, the same one's who made it their policy to lie about the Genocide in Rewanda, are centrists.
The Democratic Party is a very big mess, and their push of Socialist Health Care was simply an effort to help their UNION interests and gain more taxation - control of the US Economy.
It is really sad to see, but they have been pushing this mindless folly for years.
The Carter Malaise is alive and well.
We best get some sanity back to Washington this Fall.
What a thoroughly bullshit post.
Sutent, the very drug that could have saved Nikki Phelps, was manufactured by an American company.
Sutent does not cure cancer patients. It doesn't work that way, it's not designed to do so, it's not marketed that way. It merely increases survivorship:
"Sutent is one of the most expensive drugs widely marketed. Doctors and editorials have criticized the high cost, for a drug that doesn't cure cancer but only prolongs life."
It targets angiogenesis, the mechanism by which cancers, especially aggressive cancers, spread and kill their victims. For you to excoriate the liberals for being callous idiots who won't save American lives, but it turns out you don't know a single thing that you based your post on, that Nikki's life could never have been saved by your miracle drug, it's pathetic.
@Toma, far be it from me to claim to be a medical expert, but perhaps you could take up your arguments with The London Daily Mail, who I sourced. They wrote:
Three months ago, Bill Phelps became a widower — he watched, helpless, as his cancer-stricken young wife Nikki’s life slowly ebbed away.
Nikki, 37, a former teacher and mother of two-year-old twins, was denied the drug that might have saved her life, as it was deemed too costly by her NHS Primary Care Trust.
I wonder, then, how Mr Phelps feels after reading yesterday’s report that the NHS is happy to foot the bill for young women to have ‘virginity repairs’?
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1299116/AMANDA-PLATELL-Virginity-repairs-NHS-thats-lost-way.html#ixzz0vOSMxbE8
We'll all wait here patiently waiting for your certain, elegantly worded apology.
You want an apology for being dead wrong? By depending upon the lurid tabloid Daily Mail? You're hysterical in every sense.
I'm a molecular biologist, I have a few years of cancer research (in the nineties) to fall back upon in this discussion. That and about 5 minutes of searching the internet came up with the truth: Sutent cures nothing, no matter what bull a Daily Mail hack prods the public with.
Who says so? The company that makes it, Pfizer: "SUTENT may slow or stop some cancers, such as RCC. It works by blocking 2 basic processes that cause tumors to grow and spread. These processes are called proliferation and angiogenesis."
Got it? Plenty of drugs kill cancers. This does nothing of the sort. This drug tries to stop cancers from spreading. Period. It's used to prolong life. And that's the only thing the data have proven so far:
RCC:
At ASCO 2008, Dr Robert Figlin presented updated data from the final study analysis, including overall survival. The primary endpoint of median PFS remained superior with sunitinib: 11 months versus 5 months for IFNĪ±, P<.000001. Objective response rate also remained superior: 39-47% for sunitinib versus 8-12% with IFNĪ±, P<.000001.[9][10]
Sunitinib was associated with somewhat longer overall survival, although this was not statistically significant.
* Median OS was 26 months with sunitinib vs 22 months for IFNĪ± regardless of stratification (P-value ranges from .051 to .0132, depending on statistical analysis).
* The first analysis includes 25 patients initially randomized to IFNĪ± who crossed over to sunitinib therapy, which may have confounded the results; in an exploratory analysis that excluded these patients, the difference is becomes more robust: 26 vs 20 months, P=.0081.
* Patients in the study were allowed to receive other therapies once they had progressed on their study treatment. For a “pure” analysis of the difference between the two agents, an analysis was done using only patients who did not receive any post-study treatment. This analysis demonstrated the greatest advantage for sunitinib: 28 months vs 14 months for IFNĪ±, P=.0033. The number of patients in this analysis was small and this does not reflect actual clinical practice and is therefore not meaningful.
All of that mumbo-jumbo is about how many more months people lived with renal cell carcinoma while taking the drug versus taking the standard treatment. That's the only thing anybody knows for sure that the drug can do: extend life while you have cancer.
For it to have saved Nikki, you have to invent a scenario where a completely independent miracle cure appears some time in the extra 2-6 months that she lives. It's disingenuous, if not flat-out lying, on anybody's part to say anything otherwise.
Incidentally, I'm the second person in the thread with some experience relative to the issues to point out the off-base allegations of the post. But you and the The Enquirer -- oops -- the Daily Mail are right, and Pfizer and the researchers who ran the trials and I are all totally wrong. Right?
You can apologize to your readers for posting about a deadly serious issue without double-checking a comical, embarrassing source like the Daily Mail.
You want an apology for being dead wrong? By depending upon the lurid tabloid Daily Mail? You're hysterical in every sense.
I'm a molecular biologist, I have a few years of cancer research (in the nineties) to fall back upon in this discussion. That and about 5 minutes of searching the internet came up with the truth: Sutent cures nothing, no matter what bull a Daily Mail hack prods the public with.
Who says so? The company that makes it, Pfizer: "SUTENT may slow or stop some cancers, such as RCC. It works by blocking 2 basic processes that cause tumors to grow and spread. These processes are called proliferation and angiogenesis."
Got it? Plenty of drugs kill cancers. This does nothing of the sort. This drug tries to stop cancers from spreading. Period. It's used to prolong life. And that's the only thing the data have proven so far:
* Median OS was 26 months with sunitinib vs 22 months for IFNĪ± regardless of stratification (P-value ranges from .051 to .0132, depending on statistical analysis).
* The first analysis includes 25 patients initially randomized to IFNĪ± who crossed over to sunitinib therapy, which may have confounded the results; in an exploratory analysis that excluded these patients, the difference is becomes more robust: 26 vs 20 months, P=.0081.
* Patients in the study were allowed to receive other therapies once they had progressed on their study treatment. For a “pure” analysis of the difference between the two agents, an analysis was done using only patients who did not receive any post-study treatment. This analysis demonstrated the greatest advantage for sunitinib: 28 months vs 14 months for IFNĪ±, P=.0033. The number of patients in this analysis was small and this does not reflect actual clinical practice and is therefore not meaningful.
All of that mumbo-jumbo is about how many more months people lived with renal cell carcinoma while taking the drug versus taking the standard treatment. That's the only thing anybody knows for sure that the drug can do: extend life while you have cancer.
For it to have saved Nikki, you have to invent a scenario where a completely independent miracle cure appears some time in the extra 2-6 months that she lives. It's disingenuous, if not flat-out lying, on anybody's part to say anything otherwise.
Incidentally, I'm the second person in the thread with some experience relative to the issues to point out the off-base allegations of the post. But you and the The Enquirer -- oops -- the Daily Mail are right, and Pfizer and the researchers who ran the trials and I are all totally wrong. Right?
You can apologize to your readers for posting about a deadly serious issue without double-checking a comical, embarrassing source like the Daily Mail.
Oh, here's the Telegraph, Mr. "Molecular Biologist". And there are other sources as well.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7569517/Woman-sells-home-to-pay-for-cancer-drug-denied-by-NHS.html
So take up your beef with them. But I'm sure all of their reporters are wrong and you -- knowing the patient in question and having seen the NHS case files -- are right.
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