AIBU to tell you all that the NHS is not up for sale and that Corbyn is lying?

[Adenosine]

Background:

• NHS currently purchases drugs produced by US pharmaceutical companies at a reduced rate compared to other healthcare providers including in the US due to two factors - economy of scale as NHS is a national provider and EU patent laws which allow for patents to run out quicker than in countries outside the EU so cheaper generic equivalents are available sooner.
• the patent aspect is already problematic due to a shift in focus from pharmaceutical companies driven by scientific advances which means new products are tailored and therefore cannot be purchased in bulk and open to the same discount as they are useful to fewer people so we buy less of them and don't get money off. Cf many many news articles about NHS not buying life saving drugs.

So, that's the background. Things are already uneasy with our purchasing model unable to allow us access to new drugs.

And then brexit comes along. And with it the possible change to patent protection which has been a key figure in our purchasing negotiations. So we will have to renegotiate in light of us leaving.

And all of this is just a small snippet of the negotiations we'll have to do. But we can't start them yet, because Brexit isn't decided. No one knows what the fuck's going to happen, so we start informal talks. They're not secret as such, just off the record because nothing can be set until we leave/not.

And the content of these talks is what Corbyn's got his hands on. Talks which for very good reasons raise the issue of medicine pricing for the reasons above but which include no agreement.

Literally nothing has been agreed.

The phrase "open market access" occurs right at the beginning of the talks. It describes the US opening gambit which is open market access which the other party [ie the UK] can set out exclusions from.

It's an opener. It isn't agreed. It's just a bargaining position. And it isn't about the NHS. It's about the general US position when they open negotiations with anyone. It's what countries do when they get into negotiating talks with each other.

And Corbyn has spun all of this around into being about evil Tories selling off our glorious NHS. When that isn't happening.

MrsMaiselsMuff, yes, exactly.

Here's the Virgin case:
Why did Richard Branson sue the NHS? Virgin Care received an undisclosed settlement
metro.co.uk/2018/12/15/richard-branson-sue-nhs-virgin-care-received-undisclosed-settlement-8250870/

In November 2016, Virgin Care sued six Surrey clinical commissioning groups, NHS England and Surrey County Council after the three-year £82 million healthcare deal was awarded to a group of in-house NHS providers and a social enterprise.

There's quite a trend by for-profit companies to sue public authorities when they don't like how a contract was awarded or run.

That's bad enough when it's all happening within the UK, but there's a particularly nasty complication once you involve countries with which you have particular types of trade deals – and some US companies have form.

If you don't know about the Philip Morris tobacco cases, this will stun you.

In 2010, the Australian government announced it would introduce plain packaging for all cigarettes. The tobacco company, Philip Morris International, took the Australian government to court to try to stop this.

PMI lost.

PMI then moved ownership of its Australian operations to Hong Kong, because Hong Kong's trade deal with Australia included an Investor-State Dispute Settlement clause, which allowed Philip Morris to take the Australian government to the World Trade Organisation alleging discriminatory practices and unfairness.

The Australian government eventually won, but the case took until the end of 2015 and cost $12 million (actually $24 upfront, but in 2017 they eventually got awarded half costs).

Philip Morris tried the same trick on Uruguay (this time citing the Switzerland-Uruguay bilateral investment treaty). Uruguay won at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, but because of the sheer cost, the country only managed to mount the action with help from the charitable Bloomberg Foundation. For a while it looked like Uruguay were going to have to just roll over and have Philip Morris dictate national public health policy.

www.smh.com.au/national/the-cost-of-defeating-philip-morris-over-cigarette-plain-packaging-20190327-p5182i.html

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Morris_International#cite_note-PMIpackaging-41

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-40552304

This is one reason people are VERY worried about the details of any trade deal with the US, and how the small print will affect the NHS.

Another reason to be concerned about US-UK trade deals is how they will involve NHS data.

There are some posts about this above.

Actually my above two posts could be true of trade deals we do with any country after Brexit.

It's not confined to US deals.

No-one seems to have read the mythbuster link from the NHS Confederation I posted. I am sad.

They sold the gas, electricity, water, Royal Mail, British Airways, the railways, the buses, telecoms and more. Our local authority schools are gradually being given away and there’s previous little council housing left.
What on earth makes you think the nhs is safe from this approach?

The title of this post is a massive free advert for the Conservatives on one of the most popular forums in the country. Can’t we all just hide it and not reply so that it disappears from view? I have reported it for the same reason.

As Andrew Neil said, Boris promises us 50,000 more nurses - but almost 20,000 of them are already working for the NHS. Even he now admits that.

He promises us 40 new hospitals - but only 6 are scheduled to be built by 2025. Can he be believed when he says another 34 will be built in the 5 years after that?

Can he be trusted to fund the NHS properly when he gives us a cash figure of £34billion for additional funding but after inflation the actual figure is just £20billion?

He promises the NHS is not on the table - but he vowed to the DUP there would never be a border down the Irish Sea.

And Andrew Neil is reputed to be a Tory and used to be Boris' boss.

the NHS has always offered a mix of privately provided and "NHS" provided services. The % has remained static for years, at about 7%

No it hasn’t or there would have been no need for the 2012 Landsley Act. Since 2013, 70% of contracts have been awarded to private providers.

@BalsamicVin - you didn't need to open this thread

I have reported it for the same reason

You've reported a thread where most of the posters have dismissed the OP as false.

Really?

Not read the thread but Corbyn isn't lying and Trump definitely wants to buy it. I just hope he gets impeached in time not to run for election again.

Adenosine I started planning out a reasoned argument to your OP, and then realised many fellow MNers have beaten me to it and it’s fallen on deaf ears, so I won’t waste my time.

Instead, I’d just like to request that you go back to posting leaflets for whichever Conservative candidate you are campaigning for, or indeed are Boris, and please stop clogging up AIBU with your whinging about how shit the NHS is. We don’t believe you and I’d prefer to spend my leisurely Sunday reading about CFers and car parking woes, not getting irate at a tory bot desperately trying, and failing, to convince us that they aren’t trying to decimate our NHS.

ArthurtheCatsHumanSlave

No-one seems to have read the mythbuster link from the NHS Confederation I posted. I am sad.

Not really sure there's much value in a document that is proudly emblazoned: NHS "Con" Fed (nhsconfed). Quite aside from the lack of self awareness needed to label any document with the word "con" more than once, is the fact that to some it looks suspiciously like cornfed - which doesn't really help the discussion in hand.

I did read it, Arthur, hence my posts replying to one of its straw men. I can do another if you like.

No, I don't think "The independent sector is only used by the NHS to cut costs."

I think for-profit companies in the independent sector want to get their hands on lucrative government contracts in the multi-billion pound healthcare sector.

Some general things about the benefits to private sector companies of government contracts:

1. you don't have to run around billing individual clients and chasing piddly debts – it's all collected for you by the government;

2. you don't have to worry about pleasing individual clients – your client is the procurement section of a particular government department; that's all you have to butter up / keep happy / give jobs to afterwards;

3. competition is limited to the few other companies who can afford the massive costs of bidding for contracts; with such high entry costs, the same few companies just carve things up among them. (Seriously, why do you think G4S still gets contracts after the Olympics fiasco?)

*I also work for the NHS and it’s disgusting the lies Corbyn is peddling to scare people into voting labour. Mp’s shouldn’t try and scare people.

We’ve used non NHS in healthcare for decades. Nothing new, the NHS doesn’t have the capacity to provide everything, look at the prison service, nearly all of their healthcare is provided by private providers. Who’s going to pick all that up if Corbyn bans private companies? It’s got nothing to do with ‘selling the NHS’ it talks absolute twaddle.*

This post is twaddle.

These services have to be provided by nurses, doctors equipment, medicine etc. Why is it easier or better to pay taxes for private companies who want profit to do it than for the nhs to do it?

Lol at the idea that telling the truth is an advert for the Tories.

Eight pages in and not one person has pointed me to the exact part of the report that backs up what Corbyn is saying.

Oh I mean we've had plenty of chat about how the Tories are planning to not invest in the NHS and how they've handed out tenders while in office (as Labour did, incidentally) but not one bit of actual proof that the report says what Corbyn says it does.

And he's read it! None of you have, because it's got too many characters for Twitter, but you're telling me it backs up Corbyn's claims anyway.

I don’t know about anyone else but I don’t give a tuppenny damn what those papers do or don’t say. The evidence of the Tory intention to privatise or run down the NHS is before our eyes, clear as day. Those of us who work or have worked in it all know precisely what’s happening. We don’t need Twitter or documents from Reddit to tell us.

Most of us aren’t stupid, OP

@Adenosine I actually think you are a complete idiot. If you honestly think the NHS isn't up for sale under the Conservative government then you must have been living under a rock for the past 9 years. I work in the nhs and I can tell you 100% that it is being sold off, little by little everyday.

The Tories aren't selling the car, they are selling off parts of it daily until it is no longer recognisable as a car.

Eight pages in and not one person has pointed me to the exact part of the report that backs up what Corbyn is saying.
www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2012/7/contents

Its all in there

The leaked documents do not prove the Torries are selling the NHS.

However, it makes clear that the US wants total market access, to the NHS, as the baseline assumption in any trade deal.

Assuming the Torries get their majority, that leaves us with just Boris' word that the NHS is off the table. Aside from Boris' untrustworthiness, the fact that we'll be negotiating from a position of weakness, coupled with the Conservative's ideological opposition to social healthcare, means I can't see any outcome other than a partial or total capitulation to the US.

spamantha
The leaked documents do not prove the Torries are selling the NHS.
But the link to UK Legislation I posted DOES
Since 2012

I love advanced search. Whenever I read a post and think (or insert whatever current symbol meaning 'I smell bullshit') I always have a quick look.

Ho hum.

Ho hum what?