Patients will be entitled to expensive operations and drugs regardless of how old they are under proposed new age discrimination legislation.
The laws, which could cost the National Health Service millions of pounds, have the potential to open wide areas of extra treatment for the elderly. They would, for example, compel doctors to refer patients in their eighties and nineties for surgery and drug trials unless there was a sound medical case for denying them.
At present the NHS’s standards for care say that hospitals and doctors should not discriminate on age grounds, but it is not illegal to do so.
The legislation could also signal wide-ranging changes in healthcare provision for people earlier in their lives – by preventing health trusts, for example, from imposing upper age limits on treatment such as IVF. The current age limit of 39 is set by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), which rations NHS treatment.
The proposals will be outlined in a green paper on age discrimination expected this month.
Public bodies and service providers would have a new duty to promote age equality in the same way that they must promote race, disability and gender equality.
The legislation is expected to have the greatest impact on the NHS and the insurance industry, which routinely charges older people higher rates.
Under the proposed legislation, age-based differences in healthcare would be illegal unless they were justified by scientific evidence.
Public health programmes could still be targeted at the age groups most likely to benefit, such as vaccinations for preschool children or flu immunisations for older people.
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