An alert reader sent us a piece of interesting follow-up info to yesterday’s piece on NHS Scotland costs. Because comparable figures for NHS England are available too, and they make for surprising reading.

These are the Scottish figures for medicine costs at list price, ie before any negotiated discounts that the health service is able to obtain:

The population of England, at 55 million, is just over 10 times that of Scotland (5.4m). So one would imagine that its like-for-like costs would come in at around £12 billion.

But they don’t.

In fact, the list-price medicine bill for NHS England is a whopping 45% higher.

That bill has grown by 34% in just six years (not factoring inflation), whereas we now know that the Scottish bill rose by just 26% over TEN years (also excluding inflation).

We can find no explanation in the figures for why England is paying so much more for its medicines, especially as it’s Scotland that’s so often said to be the “sick man of Europe”. But with few significant differences in health outcomes between the two nations, it seems pretty clear who’s getting the best value for money.