Over recent years, it has been a pleasure to see the British Medical Association adopting and publicising some fairly progressive and radical policies.

It comes, therefore, as rather a disappointment to find it falling into all the old traps in its pronunciations on the rising cost of treatment in the NHS, the impossibility of funding them all and, thus, the necessity of “rationing.”

Of course, pseudo-progressive papers such as the Observer leaped onto the story like hungry pussy cats, lapping up what they described as a “new honesty.”

But new honesty it is not. Rather, it is an old misconception coming back to haunt us, recycled as yet another excuse to lambast resource allocation in the NHS.

It is highly misleading to refer to any limit on the ability to treat people as “rationing,” with its evocative overtones of shabby lines of people clutching coupons.

And it is premature to look at the necessity of limiting treatment while the entire medical and pharmaceutical sector is so grossly deformed by excessive profit-taking and the effects of privatisation.

While we are all seeing reports of ward closures and staff cutbacks in the NHS, it is instructive to look at the excessive profits of the major drug companies.

Glaxo, for example, made pre-tax profits of £2.14 billion on sales of £5.59 billion in just the first three months of this year.

While Swiss-based Novartis declared £1.1 billion profit in the first quarter of 2007, Merck, another pharmaceuticals giant, made a leap in profits of 10 per cent over the same period.

In fact, that company has such an appetite for profits extracted from the sick that Brasil’s President Lula Da Silva authorised his government to break the company’s patent on an Aids-related drug on Friday, because of the super-profits that it was extracting from Efavinens, and buy a generic replacement from India at one-third of the price.

If the NHS was not pouring around 15 per cent of its income into the coffers of these avaricious companies, there would be little need to talk of rationing.

And if new Labour had not laid out a huge proportion of its NHS expenditure to promote Tony Blair’s favourite fiction of “choice,” otherwise known as progressive privatisation of the health service, the BMA would not have to confront such stark choices as treatment restrictions and would not have been deluded into arriving at such erroneous conclusions.

It costs a great deal of cash to deal with the pharmaceutical empires and, if you add to that the cost of fuelling the developing private medicine sector with public money, cutbacks in treatment appear inevitable to the non-socialist medical Establishment.

But they are not. Granted, the remedies are on a huge scale. The nationalisation of the drug transnationals is a huge proposition, as is removing the pernicious influence of the private sector from the NHS.

And neither of these clear and necessary measures will even be considered by Gordon Brown or any of his new Labour, free marketeering ilk.

But the alternative of turning medical treatment into an economic live-or-die lottery is no alternative at all.