The British National Health Service has banned anti-cancer drug Avastin over the drug’s cost. The move follows news from last week that the Food and Drug Administration — yes, the American agency — intends to do the same in response to the passage of ObamaCare.

The health watchdog NICE says the cost of avastin – at about £21,000 per patient – does not justify its benefits.

It offers patients with advanced bowel cancer the chance of a few extra weeks or months of life. …

It is used in the US and across Europe, but patients in the UK have to buy the drug privately or appeal to their local health authority for funding.

It is estimated that around 6,500 patients a year in the UK could benefit from avastin.

Sorry, patients, your life simply isn’t worth much to the National Health Service. So you can just sit there and die rather than extend your life through the use of the latest anti-cancer medication. Welcome to government-run health care.

It’s coming to the United States, as the Washington Post reports:

Federal regulators are considering taking the highly unusual step of rescinding approval of a drug that patients with advanced breast cancer turn to as a last-ditch hope.

The debate over Avastin, prescribed to about 17,500 women with breast cancer a year, has become entangled in the politically explosive struggle over medical spending and effectiveness that flared during the battle over health-care reform: How should the government balance protecting patients and controlling costs without restricting access to cutting-edge, and often costly, treatments? …

The FDA is not supposed to consider costs in its decisions, but if the agency rescinds approval, insurers are likely to stop paying for treatment.

“It’s hard to talk about Avastin without talking about costs,” said Eric P. Winer, director of the Breast Oncology Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “For better or worse, Avastin has become in many ways the poster child of high-priced anti-cancer drugs.”

Supporters of ObamaCare made one of two different arguments for the legislation’s passage:

1) Of course American national health care would be nothing like the British National Health Service.

or

2) The British National Health Service is so much better, so much more humane, than the American health system. We should be happy to have a similar system.

They were wrong on both counts. Banning a life-extending anti-cancer drug due to high costs is not humane. But it’s apparently  in our future as government-run health care takes hold in the United States.