Simon's story (UK)

My name is Simon Brasch and I work in London. I have two older sons, who are eighteen and twenty-two, and a daughter aged seven. I am currently based in Lincolnshire and working from home. I’m a Just Treatment patient leader.

I discovered I had hepatitis C in 2016 after having a suspected heart attack. I believe I contracted this from my service in the military, when I had a blood transfusion following an accident.

Although new effective medication existed at the time, I was offered old hep C medication with terrible long-term side effects and low rates of success. I was told I had to wait to access the new medication, sofosbuvir, because of the price. 

At the time the drug maker, Gilead, were charging around £35,000 for a 12 week course of the drug. The NHS couldn’t afford it and had rationed it to 10,000 patients a year. I was told I would have to wait until my disease got worse so I qualified for treatment - or the UK was able to negotiate an affordable price. 

“I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through what I had to endure.”

In the meantime the risk of transmission was high, my mental health was terrible and I was tired and suffered common cramping of my muscles. It was two long years before I received treatment.

The experience of not being able to access a drug that I desperately needed purely because the drug company was demanding an extortionate price was a huge eye opener for me. I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through what I had to endure. I am really worried that a trade deal with the US would make these situations much more common. 

We know that the US administration and drug companies want to remove the few safeguards that we have to control medicine prices for the NHS. Were this to happen, we’d see many more examples of medicine rationing. When sofosbuvir was launched in the US in 2013, it was priced at around $84,000 (£68,000) - an astronomical figure that was nearly twice the price the company wanted in the UK. 

“I am worried that a UK-US free trade agreement could erode the principle of universal free healthcare”

We know from experience that pharmaceutical companies will exploit any opportunity to increase their profits at the cost of people’s health. We are already seeing people suffering and even dying in the UK because the drugs they urgently need are priced out of reach of the NHS - but the lack of drug price controls in the US means that prices for patented drugs are on average 2.5 times higher than here. 

I am worried that a UK-US free trade agreement could erode the principle of universal free healthcare and that we will gradually move to an even more profit driven model. Unless we explicitly protect the tools that exist to control drug pricing and legislate against extensions to patents and other forms of monopoly that would allow drug companies to charge ever higher prices, we will soon see patients facing many more experiences like mine. This is why I’m calling on peers to support the amendments to the Trade Bill that would protect and strengthen the safeguards that exist to control drug prices on our NHS.