THE NHS will have to divert almost 45 billion pounds from frontline services to pay for costlier medicines under the UK-US trade deal struck last December.
In addition, the deal is likely to cause more than 229,000 avoidable deaths in England by 2036, according to a new analysis published in the British Medical Journal.
The figure exceeds the toll of the Covid-19 pandemic in England between March 2020 and June 2022, which stood at 137,000.
Were the knock-on effect on adult social care included, the number of excess deaths would climb to 291,000, the study by researchers at the University of York, the University of Liverpool and Christchurch hospital in New Zealand found.
Most of the preventable deaths would fall among people with heart, respiratory or gastrointestinal disease, or cancer.
Under the deal, the UK agreed to pay 25 per cent more for new medicines over the next decade and to double the share of GDP the health service in England spends on innovative therapies, from 0.3 to 0.6 per cent, lifting annual outlay from the current 14.4 billion pounds.
The analysis puts the yearly cost to the NHS at 8.8 billion pounds by 2036, with the cumulative bill reaching 44.7 billion by then.
Ministers hailed the agreement as a ‘landmark’ to ‘safeguard medicines access and drive vital investment for UK patients and businesses’, and defended it as a way of sparing British drug exports the tariffs of up to 100 per cent that Donald Trump had threatened to impose.
The government has disclosed that the monetary burden would fall on the Department of Health and Social Care, which funds the NHS in England, rather than the Treasury.
MPs from Labour and several opposition parties have pressed the government to publish its own impact assessment, which remains secret.
Tim Bierley, a campaigner at Global Justice Now, said, ‘billions that could be spent on recruiting more NHS staff, cutting GP waiting times, or improving our hospital care are set to be siphoned off by corporate giants in the pharma industry’.
He added that the agreement had been rushed through without parliamentary scrutiny and that the next Prime Minister must reverse course and unpick the mess.
Sir Ciarán Devane, chief executive of the NHS Alliance, said the findings raised serious questions over whether the deal offered value for patients or the health service.
‘If billions of pounds are diverted away from frontline care to meet higher medicines costs, the consequences for prevention, community services and the treatment of long-term conditions could be profound,’ he said, urging the government to publish the full impact assessment.
Diarmaid McDonald, executive director of the campaign group Just Treatment, said the numbers should shock people to their core.
‘Across the country, our parents, our grandparents, our loved ones, dying unnecessarily in order to inflate drug company profits and please Donald Trump,’ he said.
‘This is a national scandal.’
