The main associations of cancer patients support the complaints of oncologists in ABC for the barriers that health insurers are exercising through the intermediary company Aythses-Bienzobas. According to these complaints, this company would act as an “oncological advice” putting obstacles to usual treatments in public health.
The Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM), which groups Spanish oncologists, has corroborated on Tuesday that “sometimes” cancer treatments are not being authorized that have all health authorizations “alluding to cost-effectiveness problems.” And they insist that “the final decision of the prescription does not always depend on the optional that deals with the patient, but on other actors such as the external oncological advisor and the insurer.”
The Spanish Association against Cancer is overwhelming: “If this practice is being carried out it would be inadmissible, it would directly attempt against the right to patients to receive the best possible treatment, live where they live.”
Remember the main association of patients that “it is the responsibility of the health professional to provide the best treatment option without receiving pressures of any kind.” And warns that in Spain two laws guarantee the treatment of Spanish patients: the Law of Cohesion and Quality of the Health System and the General Health Law. The first, ensures that if a patient cannot receive a treatment available in one center, he must be transferred to another center to obtain it. Likewise, the General Health Law obliges the patient to receive understandable information about the type of therapy that will be offered.
The Spanish Association against Cancer also calls “action” and claims data that allow measuring equity in the access of patients to cancer treatments.
«Currency of commercial strategies»
For its part, the Spanish group of cancer patients has also issued a statement in which it emphasizes that “access to oncological treatments cannot be conditioned by economic criteria.”
The president of this group, Begoña Barragán, echoes the complaints of “lack of transparency in the authorization processes of drugs” and that “the final decision is not always in the hands of the oncologist who treats the patient” made on Tuesday by the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology. From here, he denounces that the criteria used sometimes “seem to be guided more by profitability than by scientific evidence.” «This is inadmissible. Cancer patients cannot be a currency in commercial strategies or see their treatment conditioned by decisions outside of medicine, ”he denounces.
In this line, GEPAC reiterates its “more absolute concern” to the practices that oncologists are denouncing and claims the need to treat cancer as “a matter of state” with “a firm commitment of all administrations, insurers and health entities to ensure that each patient receives the treatment she needs, without economic restrictions or bureaucratic obstacles.” Among the demands posed by this entity, which is guaranteed the prescription of oncologists, “without external interference”, and the “total transparency in the processes of authorization of treatments in private health”, and are shielded “the rights of the patients to access the treatments approved by the regulatory and recommended agencies in the clinical guides.”
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