How do you put a price on life? How would you know where to start? In the case of the independent NHS watchdog, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), there is a points system, which calculates QALYs, or quality-adjusted life years. If a new drug costs more than £30,000 per QALY, then it's deemed too expensive for use by the NHS. So it's a bit rich for Roche, developers of the new breast cancer drug Kadcyla, to be acting all shocked that Nice says it's too expensive for use by the NHS. At the moment, treatment with Kadcyla costs more than £180,000 per QALY. Which is clearly quite steep.

Still, as usual, Nice is being portrayed as the villain. Negative decisions by Nice are typically greeted with a response from the media that invites people to imagine how they would feel if they needed a life-saving drug and bureaucrats denied to them. This one has been no different.

A woman called Kim Mawby, who thinks (but isn't certain) that she was treated with Kadcyla after she joined a drug trial in 2011, was interviewed by the Guardian this week. After her cancer spread to her lymph nodes, chest wall and lung, the mother of two faced the prospect of having six months to live. Now, more than two years on, there is no trace of cancer on her lung or chest wall and she's still going strong. It's a wonderful story, and Mawby is understandably positive about her treatment.

Reading that story, I couldn't help thinking back to the awful day I learned that my breast cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and the even more awful day when I was tested to see if it had spread to my chest wall and lungs. The relief that it hadn't was indescribable. However, eternally grateful as I am for my NHS treatment, I know that, had money been no object, less invasive treatments with fewer side-effects would have done the trick, possibly rather better. But, ghastly as the treatment I had was, I'd rather have been in a large room with other people also getting that treatment than in a small room, otherwise empty, because all the money was being spent on me. That's what Nice has to think about – the number of people that can be helped, not the absolutely best way of helping one individual.

Had I been in Mawby's shoes, though, of course I'd have wanted the treatment that could save me. I'd have agreed with Mawby, who told the Guardian: "It has given me back my normal life. You just can't put a price on it." So, nasty old Nice, who do put a price on such treatment, and a bargain-basement price at that.

Except that Nice hasn't put this chunky price on Kadcyla, has it? Roche has. Roche explains that developing new drugs is incredibly expensive, and they have to recoup their costs. Those costs have not been revealed, for commercial reasons. But Roche seems pretty good at recouping them. It made a profit of 11.4bn Swiss francs (£7.7bn) last year. As its chairman, Franz B Humer, said in his 2013 letter to shareholders: "In a challenging, increasingly cost-sensitive environment, our focus on targeted medicines and diagnostic tests has allowed us to expand our strong market position and to significantly improve net income. In light of our strong performance, the board of directors is proposing – for the 27th consecutive year – an increase in dividend." It's worth bearing in mind, reading this, that a 2012 report called The Research and Development Cost of a New Medicine reckoned that, on average, only about 10% of the overall cost of developing a new drug is taken up by research and development. Much more is spent on attracting and servicing investors. Quite a bit is spent on PR.

Kadcyla is described as "a Herceptin-like drug" – Herceptin being another groundbreaking breast-cancer drug developed by Roche. Thus far, in the British media, it's also had a Herceptin-like reception. In his book Bad Pharma, Ben Goldacre describes how, from 2005, "access to this drug became a spontanteous cause celebre for the British press". Such was the deluge of positive articles about the drug, with Nice again painted as the cruel and unfeeling master of the purse strings, that a group of academics analysed 361 newspaper stories on the subject to try to understand what was going on. It found that "half of the stories were about the problems in getting a licence for Herceptin's use in early-stage breast cancer, but they almost never mentioned that the manufacturer, Roche, needed to apply for that licence itself, and hadn't even done so yet." PR companies employed by Roche had a hand in placing many of the stories, as did charities with links to the company.

Goldacre suggests that the PR effort behind Herceptin was a response to forthcoming legislation that would allow "pharmacists to ignore brand names and substitute an identical generic copy of the drug". (Herceptin will be facing generic competition come 2016.) You could say that whenever a branded drug becomes a cause celebre, it's sending a message to potential patients and their relatives that is similar to the classic one for the blended whisky: "Don't be vague. Ask for Haig." Don't be a bad Nice-la. Ask for Kadcyla. This is all good publicity for Roche and bad publicity for Nice (and by extension the NHS).

The current case isn't quite so egregious. Nice has indeed said that Kadcyla is too expensive for NHS use. But do we really want the NHS to start using new drugs without even questioning the idea that the initial price offered by a hugely profitable multinational might not represent best value? Neither Nice nor the NHS is trying to make a profit here. Roche certainly is. And even in writing this piece, I've helped them out, by referring to Kadcyla, Roche's brand name, rather than its rather less catchy generic name, trastuzumab emtansine.

It's notable, too, that many reports about Nice's rejection of Kadcyla say that treatment using the drug is already being paid for in Britain using the dedicated Cancer Drugs Fund, introduced in 2010 to pay for treatment not universally available on the NHS. They also mention that the fund will "cease to exist at the end of March 2016". The new body that is being set up to replace it is described as "nebulous" and "ill-defined". It strikes me that this is a much more important story, as far as access to expensive treatment in Britain is concerned, than this week's story, which basically rallies the nation behind Roche rather than Nice, at the very start of negotiations that aim to reduce the cost of the drug for the NHS. It also strikes me that since Roche relies so heavily on cancer treatments for its profits the company must have more than a passing interest in making sure people in the UK are aware that the Cancer Drug Fund exists, and is in jeopardy.

So this flurry of reportage has been good for Roche. It has given the Kadcyla brand an excellent airing, alongside testimonials from the medical profession declaring what a good drug it is. It has portrayed Nice as penny-pinching, while emphasising that there's a body that will still fund treatments not approved by Nice, but which might not be there for much longer. It has portrayed Roche as trying to do the public a service, with only public services standing in its way.

I remember a time, back in the 1980s, when it was easy to argue that the big, lazy, complacent NHS couldn't be cost-efficient, simply because it was a public body, and public bodies were by nature inefficient. Now, the NHS is among the most cost-efficient health services in the developed world. It has not achieved this, I'm afraid, by rolling over and paying drugs multinationals whatever they reckon they can get away with.