The former nurse, from Stokesley, in North Yorkshire, has been diagnosed with breast cancer that has spread to the rest of her body. Her best chance of survival is to take the new "wonder drug", Avastin.

But, because of waste and bureaucratic incompetence, the South Tees Hospitals NHS Trust says it can't afford to give her the life-saving drug.

That fact alone helps explain why UK cancer survival rates lag so far behind our European neighbours – despite record amounts of taxpayers' cash being poured into the health service.

But it gets worse. Mrs Mills offered to pay the £4,000-a-month cost of Avastin out of her own savings. Fine, said the NHS, but if you do, you will be treated as a private patient and will be charged the full cost of all your treatment – about £15,000 a month, which Mrs Mills cannot afford.

So, Mrs Mills is trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare – the NHS won't give her the drug for free, but it won't let her pay for it either.

That's what you get when you allow a centralised, Soviet-style bureaucracy to run healthcare – an inflexible, lumpen, one-size-fits-all, style of treatment, not driven by patient need or any notion of fairness, but motivated by the sort of rigid, outdated ideology that should have been buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall.

Patient choice, anyone?

It is not as though allowing Mrs Mills to pay for the drugs would disadvantage anybody else.

And the argument put forward by the Department of Health, that allowing patients to combine NHS care with private "top-ups" would create a "two-tier health service", is nonsense on stilts. There always has been a two-tier health service.

I can't help thinking that a government minister's spouse would get Avastin in the blink of an eye if they were unlucky enough to be diagnosed with cancer.

And isn't it decidedly odd that when a normal taxpayer is discriminated against and bullied in this manner, there's not a peep from the usually vociferous human rights lobby.

Don't ordinary people have human
rights, too?



Moving gesture

I KNOW Salford is a bit of dump, but do you really need to pay a £8,000 bribe to persuade somebody to work there?

According to the BBC, you do. The Corporation is to spend £16.5m of licence fee money on a relocation package that is lavish beyond the dreams of avarice.

Up to 1,500 staff will get £3,000 for new carpets and curtains in order to persuade them to move from London to the BBC's new base, near Manchester.

There's also cash towards stamp duty, legal fees, surveys and Home Information Packs.

The Beeb will buy the houses of workers who can't sell – possibly opening up further liabilities – and will find jobs for workers' spouses and schools for their children.

This sort of generosity only ever happens when the people in charge are spending other people's money.



Decide, Gordon

GORDON Brown has ordered 50 policy reviews since becoming Prime Minister in June – on average, more than two a week.

So far he has ordered reviews into super casinos, drugs policy, anti-terror measures, foot and mouth disease, flood defences, the missing discs fiasco, children's television, sex education, the primary school curriculum, children's mental health services and special needs education, to name but a few.

Whenever there's a difficult judgment – or a new scandal – Gordon reaches for a trusty policy review.

Someone should have a quiet word with him – being leader means just occasionally having the courage to make a decision.