Off Topic Politics Thread

I think it is unfair to compare waiting lists on the NHS from say 30-40 years ago. Advances in medicine have meant now that more things are available to people so naturally there will be more on waiting lists.

I don't mean "oh that cancer patient can wait now, as we have a gastric band person coming in", I mean that for example there are more treatments for say cancer than there were 30 years ago. No making apologies for the state it is in, but maybe compare over no more than say 5 years and you get a true picture if you see what I am saying. That said, more investment in staff and infrastructure would keep lists down.

 

Re your last sentence first thing more investment should do is to get lists down to an acceptable levels then maintain them using modern medical technology in a massive program of preventative medicine to avoid people getting on the 'lists' in the first place.

 

In an Os style bit of conspiratorial thinking, there is no benefit to big Pharma working on preventative measures. That is why universities and governments need to stay out of the pockets of business.

In an anti-Os style bit of my own ideological thinking, capitalism doesn't promote anything which makes things cheaper and more efficient...

 

There's a deep vein of profit over people, time to man the barracades. Good luck chaps I've got a sicknote.

 

No fan of Hunter, but that guarantee has already been shown to be faulty. HB left the White House on the Friday, so wasn’t there.

 

Before I retired I was managing a budget for chemical reagents to perform diagnostic tests of £1.2 million per annum. Almost all of that went to Roche Diagnostics, a subdivision of Roche Pharmaceuticals, with a smaller amount going to Randox and a few other companies. We were tied into a 7 year contract with Roche, and the equipment they had provided wouldn’t work with any other company’s reagent kits anyway, so no opportunity to cut costs there, especially with an ever-increasing demand for tests from the GP’s and hospital doctors we served.

The contract had to comply with all the EU competitive tendering legislation, but was realistically limited to three major players anyway: as well as Roche, the main players were Abbott, and Bayer, which had recently been taken over by Siemens. The cost per test of all three worked out fairly similarly, and we went with Roche as we were used to their equipment so minimal retraining of staff was needed.

It’s worth remembering that while around 70% of the total NHS budget goes on staff salaries and wages, the vast majority of the rest is spent on commodities manufactured by the private sector.

If you look into research into pharmaceuticals and diagnostics, a lot is done In universities who are increasingly reliant on grants and so on from the private sector, who then get first dibs on any exciting new drugs that come along, the obvious recent example being the Astra Zeneca Covid vaccine developed at Oxford.

All this begs the question: why isn’t there more public funding for research into diagnostics and pharmaceuticals? And another: why is the NHS so reliant on the private sector for the £billions worth of surgical gowns, syringes, cleaning products and so on it uses every year? It’s basically free money for the companies which supply all these things, once the contract is signed the demand will never drop off and the payments will always be made, so why aren’t there public utilities providing at least some of this stuff?

 

I will never cease to be amazed that so many people see how badly government institutions fail, and still come to the conclusion that somehow the answer is more government intervention.

Those companies don’t get “free money”. They get money for providing valuable products which are required by the medical industry.

All that governments do is stifle innovation and make price rises worse.

To think that centralised governments will do a better job of sourcing products than the free market is the same trap that killed the Soviet Union. Centralised, communist control of production & labour leads to shortages, famine and death.

 

That isn’t true. Most innovation comes from academics in university and hospital labs around the world. The pharmaceutical companies pay for a lot of the research so they can hold the patents. They don’t create much themselves. If we funded those exact same industries ourselves we could reap the profits - and give ordinary people a better deal.

You are confusing big organisations with public / private. All massive companies have waste and people taking money they shouldn’t.

 

Yeah, and this should be the norm. A lot of public money -- not just in pharmaceuticals -- gets spent on research and development, with private industry ultimately holding the patents and using them to extract considerable rents from the public. A good article from a couple years ago on how this came to pass, because it wasn't always like this:

https://theintercept.com/2021/08/29/bayh-dole-act-public-science-patents/

 

Listened to a very interesting podcast about this very thing where Martin Skhreli discussed this stuff.

He’s the “pharma bro” guy that is absolutely hated in America for raising prices of certain drugs. When you listen to his side of the story and how the system actually works, it changes your opinion.

I’m by no means claiming to be an expert here. I just know for certain that public ownership tends to lead toward worse outcomes for the consumer in almost all industries.

I am not consuming anything, I am aware that large organisations experience bloat. Whilst I agree, It is a separate issue

 

The Martin Skhreli who just got out of prison for fraud? The one who hiked prices of life saving drugs for profit? Hiked them 5000%? He is proof incarnate that public health should never be entrusted to private hands.

 

He also was never a pharma bro, he was a finance bro. He didn't develop drugs, he bought patents to existing drugs. Just a straight-up parasite.

 

As proven by the great success of the UK privatisation of Water and Trains???

 

Didn’t know where to put this, but why didn’t the bbc suspend him when the complaint was made?

 

Precisely. The plundering of national resources by privatised utility companies, should give the lie once and for all to the myth of that free market always benefits customers.

 

Not to mention Foreign Companies
#takebackcontrol

 

11 January 2017

RMT Press Office:

As Italian operator takes over C2C RMT reveals that 70% of UK rail routes now wholly or partly owned by foreign ‎states.

RAIL UNION RMT has revealed today that following the first entry of an Italian company into the market that of 28 private rail contracts, 20, or 70%, are now partially or wholly owned by foreign states or their railways.

The RMT revelations come as it was announced that National Express have knocked out their C2C franchise to Italian state operator Trenitalia

#takebackcontrol

 

I knocked one out myself earlier. TMI?

 

Yes!