ABSTRACT
With the aging population and the rapid advances in modern medicine, no publicly funded healthcare system can possibly pay for every new medical treatment that becomes available. The enormous costs involved mean that choices have to be made. It makes sense to focus on treatments that improve the quality and/or length of someone's life and, at the same time, that are an effective use of National Health Service (NHS) resources. General practitioner (GP) commissioning will have to try to make decisions that are in the best long-term interests of patients and the public. This may mean that some decisions that save money in the short term need to be rethought if the long-term consequences are significant and negative. The NHS has been often treated as a political football. A better approach is to see which policies work to produce results that are in the best long-term interests of patients and the public and which polices do not work.
