9:26am Saturday 3rd February 2007
By C Lomax
Tuning into breakfast TV last week I immediately recognised a face from the past.
Having been born and brought up in Halifax I was more than familiar with the town's recently retired Labour MP Alice Mahon.
Alice served 18 years as an MP and always put her constituents first, was never afraid to speak her mind and stand up for what she believed to be right - even if it was 'off-message'.
But I got the feeling that even she couldn't believe the situation she had been forced into - speaking out against the NHS under a Labour government - accusing them of creating a 'rationing' health
service rather than a national health service.
Her sense of incredulity was palpable as she described how she had been forced to 'go private' or go blind after being denied a drug on the NHS to treat a condition called age-related macular
degeneration (AMD).
This must really stick in the throat for someone who has spent their whole life in the Labour movement (even if 'going private' isn't something that seems to offend 'new' Labour - just ask Ruth
Kelly).
Now the only thing Alice Mahon feels she can do is create as much publicity as possible to try and help the thousands of other patients out there who don't have the option of going private.
As a reporter who has attended more board meetings of NHS bodies that is probably healthy, I have often heard how the NHS is not 'a bottomless pit' and difficult decisions have to be made.
Well, yes, but how must patients in this situation, who have spent all their lives contributing to society feel, when they read stories about how the NHS is seriously considering paying for shopping
vouchers for drug addicts as an incentive for them to stay clean?
Yes, it could work if money was no object, but does this really take priority over people who face going blind, who are losing their mind to Alzheimer's disease or their lives to cancer?
Just this week I was speaking to Jacky Pickles, a Bradford midwife who has multiple myeloma, a form of cancer, for which there is no cure but can be treated with a drug called Velcade.
Jacky knows how well this drug works as she received it in February last year as part of a clinical trial. It has afforded her a quality of life she thought she would never have again.
But the powers that be have decided that Velcade isn't worth the money, just as Alzheimer's patients have been told they aren't worth the expense (all of £2.50 a day) either.
Alice Mahon has spent her life serving the Labour movement, while Jacky has spent her life caring for others as a NHS nurse and midwife - now both are being failed by these self-same
organisations.
I wish them both the best of luck in their battles to gain access to treatments which should rightfully be theirs - at no cost to them or their families.
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