In reply to Offwidth:
Well that's a fairly hefty spin on what the government actually asked NICE to do.
At the moment the decision whether to fund a new treatment or intervention is taken on the sole basis of whether the cost of the treatment to the health service (including the change in estimated future healthcare costs), divided by the health gains is below a certain ratio (£20-30,000 per Quality-Adjusted Life Year, the preferred metric of health).
The new proposals were that perhaps the decision rule should consider the wider benefits to society of a treatment. So, for example, if a treatment also somehow reduced crime (e.g. a treatment which reduces drinking or helps people give up illegal drugs) as well as tackling health, this should be considered (which it wouldn't be under the existing system, since that only considers health-related benefits).
It now seems that NICE has said that this is impossible, in no small part (I would imagine) due to the fact that quantifying these other wider benefits is incredibly problematic (quantifying health benefits is difficult enough).
I am not aware of any debate about considering the social worth of the individual receiving the treatment, which appears to be what your man Roy Lilley is trying to frame the concept of wider societal benefits to mean (wrongly). I'm happy to be proved wrong on this though if you can provide evidence beyond some scaremongering blogging and the Daily Mail.
There are a huge number of other issues in decisions like this, for example whether all health gains are equal irrespective of who receives them, or how much you take into account the future potential healthcare resource use of the recipient of the treatment (since if you save the life of a child, they have many more years of using up NHS resources, but the logical conclusion of that argument is Logan's Run, which I don't think anybody is sensibly advocating). It's complicated. Trying to suggest that the government are hoping to pursue some kind of pro-rich person agenda through it is a little bit nuts (and I'm not fan of the present government, they're a shower of evil bastards).