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Health Bill [HL]

The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has made a good point in sounding a warning that patients might, as it were, die of embarrassment or guilt rather than go to the doctor and get a renewed prescription. Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, as I have been in the past. One could regard this as part of the "responsibility agenda", the term often used to denote our collective wish to get patients to take responsibility for their own health and their own care. My only detailed point is one that has already been flagged up in various forms: it is difficult to refer to the actual cost or the full retail cost of any drug. Those are elusive, will-o’-the-wisp terms. I suggest that the noble Lord might consider replacing those terms with "the recommended retail price", which is something you can pin down. I hope that he will not let this go and that we will have a chance to debate it again.