Even Dracula worked for no profit

1) Plasma Resources is owned by the Dept of Health, not the NHS. So how is this privatisation of the NHS rather than of something from the Dept of Health?

2) The NHS does not produce its own nappies, its own pharmaceuticals: any reason why it should produce its own plasma?

3) This is plasma, not blood.

4) We import a lot of our plasma from the US anyway, as a result of Mad Cow disease. Quite why anyone would be worried about who owns a US commercial operation I’m not sure.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200203/ldhansrd/vo021218/text/21218w05.htm

Lord Burlison asked Her Majesty’s Government:

When they will announce plans to secure plasma supplies.[HL808]

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath: On the evening of Monday 16 December, the Department of Health completed its purchase of the largest remaining independent US plasma collector, Life Resources Incorporated. This will secure long-term supplies of non-UK blood plasma for the benefit of NHS patients, and ensure that the current global plasma shortage will not reduce the availability to National Health Service patients of life-saving plasma products. An independent option appraisal conducted by KPMG concluded that this purchase was the most cost-effective way of achieving these objectives.

Plasma is used to manufacture products for the treatment of a wide range of conditions. Every year the NHS uses:

5,000 kilos of albumin for the tens of thousands of patients treated for burns, shock and major trauma.

2,000 kilos of intravenous immunoglobulin for patients with immune disorders. This includes 1,800 patients with primary immune deficiency who require an injection every two to three weeks throughout their lives to protect them against infection. Thousands more patients are given intravenous immunoglobulin to treat neurological and other conditions.

120,000 bottles of Anti-D immunoglobulin to protect unborn children suffering from haemolytic diseases of the newborn. This affects roughly 64,000 pregnancies a year and, in a small number of cases, can cause stillbirth, severe disability or death after birth from anaemia or jaundice.

400,000 bottles of Factor VIII to treat around 3,000 haemophilia patients,

Around 45 per cent of the plasma products needed by the NHS in England and Wales are manufactured by the NHS-owned Bio Products Laboratory. The remainder are purchased by the NHS on the open market from third party commercial suppliers.

In 1998, the Government instructed BPL to stop using UK plasma to make these products because of concerns about the theoretical risk from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Since then, BPL has purchased plasma from the United States. The US has no reported cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and is the only country able to supply the quality of plasma that BPL needs in sufficient quantity. The US collects 60 per cent of the world’s

18 Dec 2002 : Column WA120
plasma and supplies between 35 and 45 per cent of the plasma products used in Europe alone.

Up to now these supplies have been dependent on contracts with US plasma collection companies. Over the past two years most of these companies have been purchased by commercial manufacturers wishing to secure their own plasma supplies. This radically reduced the amount of US plasma that BPL could buy under contract and threatened our ability to supply sufficient non-UK plasma products to NHS patients.

Without continuing, secure supplies of US plasma, BPL faced shutdown by 2004 with a consequent removal of massive volumes of plasma products from the NHS market. Independent market analysis by KPMG demonstrated that commercial suppliers would not be able to provide sufficient, secure supplies of plasma products to the NHS if BPL closed. Immediate action was therefore needed to secure long-term supplies of high quality, US plasma for BPL.

The Department of Health has purchased the trade and assets of Life Resources for an up-front payment of £48.8 million with a further £21 million tied into the performance of the company up until the end of 2006. The department has paid a commercial price for the business assets based on same analysis as a private sector purchaser would have undertaken.

Life Resources has supplied BPL with plasma since 1999. It has extremely high quality and safety standards overseen by the US Food and Drugs Administration and the UK Medicines Control Agency. All the company’s collection centres are inspected by BPL on a rolling two-year programme. BPL’s team also inspected every centre prior to the purchase.

An effective corporate governance regime has been established for the ongoing management of Life Resources. The company will be run by its existing US management team and report to a US parent company, DCI Biologicals Incorporated. DCI Biologicals will report to a UK parent company, Plasma Resources Ltd. The board of Plasma Resources Ltd is chaired by Richard Douglas, the Department of Health’s director of finance and investment.

The Government have appointed Mr Philip Cushing as non-executive chair of DCI Biologicals. Mr Cushing is highly qualified for this role. His previous positions include chief executive of Inchcape (1996–99) and chief executive of Vitec Group PLC (2000–01). He is also currently chairman of Paragon Print and Packaging Limited, Spalding, Lincs, and a non-executive director of Ikon Office Solutions Inc, Philadelphia, USA. He was appointed to chair DCI because of his extensive international business experience, including a career involving American operations since 1977. He also has extensive international acquisitions experience built up over 20 years.

This deal is a logical extension of the existing relationship between the NHS and an established US plasma supplier, Life Resources, and is a pragmatic solution to the problem of securing supply.

many people donate blood for the NHS because it is a good thing to do. Any suggestion that this is just supporting a companies profits and this could have a serious risk for donation rates.

You can only sell all the family silver once.

Commercial entities do not have our best interests at heart – if they did, they would not be in business for long.

Tim sucking corporate cock as usual.

Democracy no longer exists. The politicians, and their propaganda lackeys like Tim are corprorate whores to the elites. Health, education are all to be privatised because the elites want control over every aspect of our lives. Oh, and they want all that lovely tax payers money paid to them.

Socialism is now for the rich and market forces for the poor. Hence Tim’s beloved Adam Smith institute calling for more deregulation for banks last week. Yes, you heard that right. But then Adam Smith have been wrong about everything for the last 30 years. Just another tin pot right wing think tank financed by millionaires and billionaires to promote policy for their own interests.

Absolutely Sally-Spot on.

@5 Limiting Factor

Total nonsense – if a commercial organisation does not provide a service wanted by its customers then it will go out of business.

[8] ‘Total nonsense – if a commercial organisation does not provide a service wanted by its customers then it will go out of business’ – which can be a bit of a bummer once you have 31,000 vulnerable and elderly residents depending on you to keep your financial business plans afloat.

It is claimed ‘The US private equity firm Blackstone made £600 million on secret financial dealings in a 4 year period on the care homes now run by Southern Cross. They top the list of the greedy in the sorry saga that is Southern Cross’.
http://www.gmb.org.uk/pdf/SX%20Gullible%20and%20Guilty%20v7b.pdf

Lets not forget the needs of fatcats and continuity of care can be mutually exclusive concepts – when it all goes belly up guess who will be expected to pick up the pieces?

@8

Commercial entities do not have our best interests at heart – if they did, they would not be in business for long.

Compare and contrast

Total nonsense – if a commercial organisation does not provide a service wanted by its customers then it will go out of business.

I put it to you that the Arms industry provides services wanted by it’s customers and most certainly does NOT have our best interests at heart.

@6: “But then Adam Smith have been wrong about everything for the last 30 years.”

Actual quotes from Adam Smith: Wealth of Nations (1776), which fans of the latter-day Adam Smith Institute are apt to overlook:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary.”
Source: The Wealth of Nations: Book 1, Chapter 10, Part 2

“The third and last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain.”
Source: The Wealth of Nations: Book 5, Chapter 1, Part 3.

http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/adam-smith/Wealth-Nations.pdf

“Health Minister Simon Burns told the House of Commons on Friday that a sale was necessary to ensure PRUK, “can successfully compete in the global market.””

Why does everything have to ‘compete’, FFS! It is an indication of the swivel-eyed and froth-lipped obsession of the economic far-right that they think that nothing – nothing – is of any value unless it can be marketised and monetised.

The trouble with Simon Burns claim thar a sale was necessary to ensure PRUK, “can successfully compete in the global market” is that he doesn’t explain how the sale will achieve this aim. The claim has become a mindless cliche. From news in the last few days:

“The UK government is abandoning plans to sell off its 49% shareholding the UK’s part-privatized air navigation services provider NATS.

“Secretary of State for Transport Justine Greening said in a written statement that the responses to a call for evidence run last year ‘highlighted the strategic importance of NATS to the UK and the far reaching implications of a sale at this time. These include the continued development of the Single European Sky agenda and the ongoing work on the Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research Programme (SESAR).’”
http://atwonline.com/aircraft-engines-components/news/uk-abandons-plans-nats-share-sell-0712

How come the complete privatisation of NATS is being blocked by the government? Wouldn’t privatisation enable air traffic into and out of Britain to compete successfully in a global market”

If you believe anything that the Tories say regarding the National Health Service you must be a complete and utter idiot !

The bottom line is : ALL of the National Health Service will be sold off in the not to distant future if the Tories win the next general election, all of it !

I don’t hear Ed Miliband screaming from the roof tops that he will attempt to reverse what the Tories have/are doing with OUR National Health Service.

Other west European countries manage taxpayer funded healthcare services without the state becoming a verging-on monopoly supplier of healthcare services. The NHS reportedly employs 1.7 millions, making it the largest exployer in western Europe by a wide margin. By independent assessments, many of the healthcare systems in other west European countries have better patient outcomes on average than the NHS. In the news:

Almost 12,000 patients are dying needlessly in NHS hospitals every year because of basic errors by medical staff, according to the largest and most detailed study into hospital deaths ever performed in the UK.

The researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and colleagues found something went wrong with the care of 13 per cent of the patients who died in hospitals. An error only caused death in 5.2 per cent of these – equivalent to 11,859 preventable deaths in hospitals in England.

Helen Hogan, who led the study, said: “We found medical staff were not doing the basics well enough – monitoring blood pressure and kidney function, for example. They were also not assessing patients holistically early enough in their admission so they didn’t miss any underlying condition. And they were not checking side-effects… before prescribing drugs.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/doctors-basic-errors-are-killing-1000-patients-a-month-7939674.html

@9 charge nurse:

Yes Southern Cross failed and presumably the taxpayer stepped in. Just like it would have cost the taxpayer had the care homes been run by the public sector.

@10 Cylux

Who gets to decide what is in our best interests? I suspect what you think is in our best interests will be different to mine. No doubt Stalin thought what he was doing was in the best interests of the Russian people.

@ 16 Fungus

“Who gets to decide what is in our best interests?”

Well, the options on the table appear to be:

1) Ourselves, via elected representatives.
2) Whoever’s got the deepest pockets and the biggest stick.

I pick option 1. What you’ve done is indentify a flaw with statism that is far worse under statism’s alternatives.

“many people donate blood for the NHS because it is a good thing to do. Any suggestion that this is just supporting a companies profits and this could have a serious risk for donation rates.”

Steve. We do not make *plasma* out of British blood because of mad cow disease. This is the *plasma* supplier being flogged off.

It has nothing to do with donations of blood in Britain.

“Yes Southern Cross failed and presumably the taxpayer stepped in. Just like it would have cost the taxpayer had the care homes been run by the public sector.”

No. The taxpayer did not step in. A new company took over the Southern Cross homes. The landlords lost some of their rent. There was no gap in care and the taxpayer paid, as we had been all along, the fees for people being in nursing homes.

“Why does everything have to ‘compete’, FFS!”

Because it does compete. Recall, they are not making plasma out of Brisih blood. They are buying it in America. That’s the market they have to compete in.

@16 The point being made was that, contrary to your first statement, acting in a way that isn’t in the best interests of many, even your customers, is not mutually exclusive with being a successful business.
The arms industry is the most blatant example, but there’s plenty of other examples out there if you care to look.

I can still recall those times, several decades ago now, when it was (seriously) claimed that it was a strategic necessity to have production capacity in Britain to manufacture underwear, subsidised by taxpayers in the event of British manufacturers being unable to compete with Asian producers. I mean, consider the terrible national plight if there was a war and there were no British producers of underwear.

” I mean, consider the terrible national plight if there was a war and there were no British producers of underwear.”

We’d have been caught with our pants down.

@21, no, we’d all be going Commando

The war would be brief. After all, our best fighters are boxers, bra none. And we’d probably end up fighting on two y-fronts.

@6 – I don’t for one second believe you actually read past his name before giving your cliche riddled response.

bread and butter play
cool as a cucumber
dodged the bullet
fat cat
slow off the mark
get the lead out of your feet
It ain’t rocket science.
go hat in hand
divide the spoils
Knock you from hell to breakfast

@23 – but the media would almost certainly get their knickers in a twist.

[18] ‘The taxpayer did not step in’ – Lloyds and Barclays wrote off £50 million in debts (after coming under pressure from the government) to avoid pushing southern cross into insolvency.
Obviously the financial collapse of SC would have put thousands of old people at risk of homelessness.

41% of Lloyds is owned by the British public (following the 2008 bailout) so how can you say the taxpayer did not step in when Lloyds underwrote the lions share of the debt (to the tune of £30mil).

The whole sorry episode proves how fatcats can sometimes be exposed once there is little more than a fig leaf covering their flimsy assets!

‘The taxpayer did not step in’ – Lloyds and Barclays wrote off £50 million in debts (after coming under pressure from the government) to avoid pushing southern cross into insolvency.
Obviously the financial collapse of SC would have put thousands of old people at risk of homelessness.”

Err, Southern Cross did go insolvent.

No old people became homeless. The landlords simply found other people to manage the homes.

[27] ‘Err, Southern Cross did go insolvent’ – how does that alter the fact the public subsidised a write off to the tune £12 million (given that Lloyds wrote off a total debt of £30mil, and the public own 40% of the bank).

The bottom line is a company that goes tits up with tens of thousands of vulnerable clients relying them has slightly different consequences to an outfit like Ratners failing – that’s because peoples lives are generally considered to be slightly different to other stuff bought and sold in the market place.
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/11_01/ratnerMS0211_468x316.jpg?w=300&h=300

Left to the market place alone a higher % of people would do less well when it comes to complex matters like their health – Southern ‘bail out’ Cross exemplify this, surely?

“‘Err, Southern Cross did go insolvent’ – how does that alter the fact the public subsidised a write off to the tune £12 million (given that Lloyds wrote off a total debt of £30mil, and the public own 40% of the bank). ”

What the hell’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?

When a company goes bust, yes, the people who lent it money have to write off the money they lent them. This is what going bust means.

None of this is changed by the fact that Southern Cross ran care homes, nor that Lloyds is a partially taxpayer owned bank. companies do go bust all the time: banks, whether taxpayer owned or not have to write off their debts all the time.

The only important point about Southern Cross was that it was indeed providing services to the vulnerable elderly. Now, if their going bust had meant those vulnerable elderly being thrown out on hte street then I would have been as outraged as you. More so probably for I know damn well that it didn’t need to happen. As, in fact, if didn’t happen.

What did happen is that Southern Cross went bust. Those who owned the shares lost all their money. Those who had lent it money had to write off part or all of those debts. That’s what happens, and rightly so, in bankruptcy. The elderly? They didn’t miss a day’s care nor did any of them move.

Because, as you might remember, Southern Cross didn’t own any of the homes. They only managed them. So, the people who owned the homes brought in a new group of managers and everything is still running.

I will admit to being very amused about all of this. That you’re still whining about Southern Cross when it’s a year since the bankruptcy and nothing bad did happen. Ban management lost the shareholders their money. Excellent, this is what is supposed to happen in a capitalist system.

[29] ‘you’re still whining about Southern Cross when it’s a year since the bankruptcy’ – my concern goes beyond SC – but their case signifies two salutory principles.

[1] mismanagement will cost the public (at least £12million in this case) – in other words when things go wrong financially it is the public rather than the fatcats who will be expected to pick up the tab – irrespective of how much profit has already been squeezed out of those, who, because of their health or age are dependent on certain services (for example, US private equities firm, Blackstone was said to have earned £640 mil on the back of the SC flotation – yet when there was trouble at’mill it was the public, not the profiteers who had to cough up).

[2] Lansley has deemed it appropriate to roll out the ‘any willing provider’ model to other spheres of the NHS – but as SC so clearly illustrate the early portents are hardly encouraging, especially given that the Blackstones of this world will be very quick to asset strip any concern that is successful at squeezing money out of either the public purse (today) or via health insurance schemes in the not too distant future.

30

Well if it costs the public £12m because ‘they own 40%’ – presumably the public are responsible for 40% of job losses of 45,000 since the HBoS takeover’. Plus the c£20bn bad debts.

Southern Cross was set up to fail. Blackstone sold all of the properties to the Royal Bank of Scotland for £1 billion three months before the sale for £640 million.
Southern Cross then entered a rental deal paying more than the market value with a clause that they paid an extra 2.5% every year for the next thirty odd years.
Anyone with limit knowledge of how the care industry is funded would know this model could not work.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/36126

@19 So if BAE for example did not act in the interests of its customers do you think it would still be in business?? Businesses can only be successful if customers want to buy its products at a price agreeabole to the business.

The Tories and LibDem Head Nodders have told BAREFACED LIES. Has anyone got enough capital to take them to court, preferably before they leave the UK with no state assets?

Scum, whores to the private sector, whores to the vultures waiting to pick very last oune of flesh off the English NHS. I wish I was younger so I could go in to battle with these vile operators.

@ 34 Fungus

“So if BAE for example did not act in the interests of its customers do you think it would still be in business?? Businesses can only be successful if customers want to buy its products at a price agreeabole to the business.”

Acting in customers’ interests is not the same as having an acceptable price. It’s an oversimplification that ignores things like mis-selling, monopolies, and tragedy of the commons (e.g. a company pollutes, harming all its customers, but an individual boycott won’t make a difference so customers can’t opt out).

@ 36 Chaise

Acting in customers’ interests is not the same as having an acceptable price. It’s an oversimplification that ignores things like mis-selling, monopolies, and tragedy of the commons (e.g. a company pollutes, harming all its customers, but an individual boycott won’t make a difference so customers can’t opt out).

Miss-selling risks serious reputational damage as well as punitive fines. pollution should be regulated against (as it is) and taxed to make up for the harm to non users.

@ 37 Fungus

“Miss-selling risks serious reputational damage as well as punitive fines.”

But it’s entirely possibly that companies will assess these risks (or the first where the second does not apply) and decide that mis-selling is still the better decision. Otherwise mis-selling would not exist as a concept. Hence, this is an example of the fact that “good for business” =/= “in customers’ interests”.

“pollution should be regulated against (as it is) and taxed to make up for the harm to non users.”

Agreed, because otherwise companies will act in a way that is good for business but not in consumers’ interests. See what I mean? The two ideals CAN overlap but there’s no rule stating that they always do.

will you be expected to make co-payments for blood? if you can’t afford it, will you not get enough blood but only half measures?
Does the person who supplied the blood get paid for it?
Will you be able to sell your kidneys?
Will you be able to sell your deceased relatives’ organs?
And if the companies are listed on the stock exchange, then do you have shares in blood money?