IN London, Jonathan Chapple was told to pay £55,000 for treatment with a life-prolonging cancer drug. In Paris, Marie-Chantal Lauriot-Prévost is given the same medicine free.

Chapple’s experience is common in Britain, but across Europe and North America it is the exception.

Andrew Dillon, chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), admitted that drugs that could benefit patients are being turned down for prescription on the NHS.

He disclosed that Nice is considering giving guidance to patients about how to spend their own money on medicines that the National Health Service does not fund. It is a tacit admission that the NHS can no longer aspire to provide a full range of the latest treatments.

Chapple, a 69-year-old retired company chairman from Kingston, southwest London, was told by the NHS that if he bought cetuximab privately he would lose all his state-funded care and would have to foot the £55,000 bill for his complete treatment at the Royal Marsden hospital in London.

Doctors have told Chapple that the drug, brand-named Erbitux, could be effective against a cancer in his bowel. Erbitux is normally taken in combination with a chemotherapy drug and has been shown to shrink tumours.

It costs about £3,000 a month and is deemed too expensive to be made commonly available on the NHS.

In Paris, however, Lauriot-Prévost, 75, a retired psychologist, benefited from Erbitux for three months as part of a trial and the drug is now routinely available to French patients.

Patients in most comparable European countries and in the US receive the drug through their national health system or health insurance.

Louis Falco, 56, from New York, has been treated with Erbitux for his bowel cancer for the past two years at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering centre, one of America’s two leading cancer hospitals. Falco, a former driving instructor, believes it is responsible for keeping him alive to see his first grandchild.

Falco received 80% of the cost of the drug from Medicare, the government-run health insurer. He said: “I didn’t have to fight for it at all. The payment was all done through the hospital. I have taken this drug now in conjunction with the chemotherapy for about two years and it has helped keep my tumours in check.”

Dr Leonard Saltz, an oncologist at the hospital, says there are about 400 patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering receiving the drug. He points out, however, that Erbitux is not a wonder-drug: it shrinks tumours in only a fifth of patients.

In Belgium Jozef van de Poel, 63, a retired telecommunications manager from Antwerp, has Erbitux funded entirely by the Belgian healthcare system for his bowel cancer. Belgium charges a contribution for some services, such as appointments with doctors, but cancer medicines are funded entirely.

In Germany, Gunter Natus, 55, an engineer from Darmstadt, receives Erbitux through the health system. He said: “The size of the tumours have reduced and I can now lead a normal life.”

His surgeon, Professor Dirk Jaeger, said: “I don’t understand why the NHS does not want to cover the cost of treatment with Erbitux. The newest data shows that it provides a good response with a high success rate when combined with chemotherapy.”

The Sunday Times Right to Pay campaign is fighting for a change in the government policy of withdrawing NHS care from patients who choose to pay for medicines that the state does not fund.

The government began an inquiry after The Sunday Times reported the case of Linda O’Boyle, who died from cancer after being denied NHS treatment because she paid privately for a drug.

Dillon said that Nice was now being forced to consider advising patients who wish to “top-up” their treatment. He said: “One of the contributions that we feel we would be in a very good position to make, and that we would like to make, would be to provide information to patients to enable them to make their own judgments, in an informed way, about whether using their own money was the right thing to do.”

Additional reporting: Brendan Montague, Lucy Wadham, Michael Woodhead and Annamarie Cumiskey

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