Selling The Nhs

[davrobcarall]

ok i am confused by how a country and sell their health service to another one???
is it selling the model structure?or the workers.....

[emmie]

no its the contracts over who does what, and the drugs, which is they come from USA could well be more expensive than what we have now. Some parts of the NHS get outsourced to private health companies already, but the whole of the NHS service is not for sale, at least that is what is being touted by both Cons and labour

[emmie]

sure some have better explanations, those who work in it.

[ToraToraTora]

You can't "sell the NHS", It's just Labour spin, they are referring to potentially awarding contracts to US companies.

[Buenchico]

The NHS currently pays well below the full market price for many of the drugs it purchases. (That's because the NHS uses it's bulk-buying power to negotiate hefty discounts with drug manufacturers). Further, some other countries use the prices that the NHS pays as a reference point and refuse to pay more for their own purchases. (So the UK's system is effectively reducing the money that drug manufacturers get from selling to those other countries as well).

The USA regards the system as unfair to US drug manufacturers and is likely to make it a condition of any free trade agreement between the UK and the USA that the NHS will in future pay the full market price for any drugs purchased from the USA. In some cases that could mean that the NHS will have to pay several times what they're currently paying. (The idea that the USA will make such a demand isn't something simply pulled out of thin air by those opposed to Brexit. The USA has already included such a condition within its free trade agreement with South Korea).

So, despite the references to 'selling the NHS to the USA' that some politicians (and some elements of the media) like to use, the actual concern is that the NHS will have to hand over far more money to US drug companies. The Labour party has put the figure as an additional burden of half a billion pounds per year upon the NHS but others challenge their figures.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-50295231

[tonyav]

“We have absolutely nothing to do with it and we wouldn’t want to if you handed it to us on a silver platter. We want nothing to do with it.”

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/corbyn-tells-trump-nhs-will-never-be-for-sale-under-labour/ar-BBXGyyn

[ToraToraTora]

the amount we spend on the NHS we could buy a big pharma company and make our own at cost.

[Ellipsis]

Trump, 4 June 2019: "When you're dealing in trade everything is on the table - so NHS or anything else. A lot more than that. But everything will be on the table, absolutely."

Trump, 3 December 2019: “I don't even know where that rumour started ... We have absolutely nothing to do with [the NHS] and we wouldn’t want to if you handed it to us on a silver platter. We want nothing to do with it.”

So, what do you believe? And where could that rumour have started?!