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Health Bill

My Lords, I commend the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, on tabling the amendment, which has a great deal of merit in it. He is right that many patients obtain repeat prescriptions without thinking about whether they need them and accumulate boxes of different drugs, some of which are expensive. The trouble is that some of the most responsible and sickest patients will look at the price of their drugs, feel horrified and feel honour bound to the rest of the population to stop them. Therefore, there is a tension between this action coming out of the blue and remaining with the status quo. As far as I know, there has never been a large scale study of the merits or otherwise of pricing up the drugs for patients. There are merits too in terms of giving information to patients. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, will accept that the amendment is probably a little before its time and that when a definitive study has been carried out—many people have the hunch that he will be proved right—it may then be a good measure in terms of informing the public about the drugs that they are taking and openness of information.