Jon Dale, Unite the Union, Nottinghamshire health branch
Some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies have cancelled investments in the UK worth almost £2 billion. New research centres planned in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge have been halted in the past few weeks. This is another blow to Labour’s vain hopes of private ‘growth’ funding the NHS and other public services.
AstraZeneca, and other companies, claim the NHS isn’t paying enough for the medicines they make and sell. The NHS spends 9% of its total budget on drugs and medical supplies, compared to similar countries’ 14-20% of health spending.
The size of the NHS enables it to negotiate better deals from the drug companies. This is threatened as our health service is splintered and privatised.
US President Donald Trump has demanded that European countries pay more. He claims that US patients are paying to subsidise our NHS. US prices are on average 278% higher than 33 other OECD ‘advanced capitalist’ countries.
Predictably, the pro-big business Labour government is caving into Trump’s demands, with a deal that would mean paying billions of pounds more, in return for low or zero tariffs on UK medicines imported in the US. Trump has threatened 100% tariffs on medicine imports into the US.
This ‘deal’ would knock a hole in the NHS budget, swell drug companies’ already vast profits, and do nothing to stop US patients paying extortionate prices. The rampant free-market private healthcare industry and insurance racket in the US is the reason patients pay more there.
Wes Streeting
Labour – and its health secretary Wes Streeting – is also conceding to Big Pharma’s demand to pay more for their drugs. But health economists have shown that spending on conventional healthcare –
GPs, A&Es, or surgery can do more to improve and extend healthy lives. Under Labour austerity, spending more on the most expensive drugs means less for other NHS care, benefiting fewer people.
And what about the money wasted on drug company profits? And the NHS money wasted on Private Finance Initiative (PFI) payments, private healthcare paid by the NHS, and other NHS funds pouring into private company bank accounts?
A socialist NHS would bring all these private companies, including the pharmaceutical giants, into the NHS, with public ownership and democratic control by health workers and the wider community.
A socialist society – addressing poverty, poor housing, pollution, and the other major contributors where capitalism causes ill-health – would be of far more benefit than swelling Big Pharma profits.
