This week the Conservatives, backed by their proponents in the black top press, called for a tax of £2.5 million on asthma sufferers.

 

Ludicrous as this sounds that would be the outcome of their demands to bring back the tax on ill-health that is prescription charges.

The Tory illness tax would also see, for example, a tax of £2.5 million of people with dermatological conditions, a tax of £4.5 million on mental ill-health, and £4.6 million on people with heart conditions.

This is the reality of the Tory rhetoric.

Free prescriptions mean that everyone gets access to the medicines that their doctors have prescribed to them.

A survey last year of over 5,000 people with chronic conditions in England, by the Prescription Charge Coalition, found that over a third had found the cost of their medication prevented them from taking it as prescribed.

The experience of prescription charges are made clear in the survey, with respondents explaining that "Money is very tight. I have to make sure my family have a roof over their head and food to eat. If it's close to pay day, I normally have to delay getting my prescription as I need to prioritise family, food and bills".

One respondent with multiple sclerosis (MS) explained that due to cost of prescriptions that "I have been skipping some of my medication so that it lasts longer. MS Hurts me whatever I do, my medication stops the pain completely overwhelming me..."

And the consequence of people not getting the medication they need is not just suffering to the individual, invidious though that is, it can also lead to greater costs to the NHS. As one asthma sufferer explained in the Prescription Charge Coalition survey: "I could not afford my prescription for an inhaler, therefore I had an asthma attack and ended up in hospital, so have to miss a few days' work."

Around two million people - 40 per cent of the Scottish population - have a long term condition, and prior to the abolition of prescription charges approximately two-thirds of all paid-for prescriptions related to long-term conditions.

These long term health issues can include chronic pain or osteoarthritis. We see absolutely no reason that people suffering from any of these conditions should be made to pay for their pain and face the substantial drain on their income that prescription charges could represent.

That is particularly true as around 600,000 adults living in families with an annual income of less than £16,000 could have been previously liable for prescription charges.

Before abolition of charges there was no automatic exemption for people in cancer treatment, or with certain chronic conditions. I don't want to go back to those days where people didn't just worry about being ill, but also how much it would cost them.

For me, that is fundamentally wrong and against the founding principles of the NHS I strongly believe in.

Those who advocate bringing in a tax on illness have suggested that free prescriptions are costing our NHS too much and has led to an increase in the numbers of drugs prescribed.

That just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. In the last ten years the number of prescribed items in Scotland increased by around 35%, but over the last decade in England where prescription charges remain the number of prescriptions has increased by over 58%.

Even examining the first three years since the introduction of free prescriptions shows that the number of items in Scotland increased by 4.2 per cent, but in England over the same period they increased by 7.1 per cent.

The trends in increased prescriptions are clearly understood to relate to an increase in the number of medicines that are available today for treatment, and due to an ageing population with multiple conditions to manage and address.

So those who suggest that the scheme has somehow prompted a glut of prescriptions need to explain why England's NHS - which has gone down a different route - has experienced the same, if not more extreme trends.

Another fallacy is that you could simply reintroduce charges for those that are able to pay.

This completely ignores the potentially costly nature of setting up a means tested system to exempt some conditions, or people on certain incomes.

That is why free prescriptions are not only the right thing to do from a principled point of view, but also the most effective and efficient thing to do - and many people are benefitting from having free prescriptions.