How can the NHS be running out of heroin?
Jeremy Corbyn tells us all that he’d never allow a free trade agreement with the United States because this would mean the NHS would have to pay more for drugs:
There is a plot against our NHS. Boris Johnson is engaged in a cover-up of secret talks for a sell-out American trade deal that would drive up the cost of medicines and lead to runaway privatisation of our health service.
US corporations want to force up the price we pay for drugs, which could drain £500m a week from the NHS. And they demand the green light for full access to Britain’s public health system for private profit.
Our public services are not bargaining chips to be traded in secret deals. I pledge a Labour government will exclude the NHS, medicines and public services from any trade deals – and make that binding in law.
We have to admit that we can’t quite see the mechanism here. Freer trade means a reduction in the barriers to people offering us their production. As buyers that means we get offered more sources of supply. Quite how more people being able to offer us their goods increases prices we can’t quite see.
But then perhaps the NHS should be paying more for drugs anyway?
The NHS is running short of dozens of lifesaving medicines including treatments for cancer, heart conditions and epilepsy, the Guardian has learned.
An internal 24-page document circulated to some doctors last Friday from the medicine supply team at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), headed “commercial-sensitive”, listed many drugs currently hit by shortages at the NHS.
As we all know - at least should - the NHS negotiates down the prices it pays for drugs from whatever source. And one of the things about offering prices lower than other people for your purchasing is that at times people will find better places, other people to sell to. A shortage is in fact evidence that the price being offered is too low.
Which brings us to this, one of the drugs in that short supply:
Diamorphine: “insufficient stock to cover full forecasted demand in both primary and secondary care”.
Diamorphine is heroin. It’s nothing else either. And a regular complaint about that drug is that there are copious stocks in every city, town, village and hamlet in the country.
The market, paying whatever is the market price - even through that cost of illegality - provides enough heroin to float us all off into feeling no pain at all. The NHS manages, at that very same time, to have a shortage of the same stuff. You know, perhaps there’s something wrong with the price the NHS is paying? It’s too low perhaps?