NHS wins £4.5m from drug company

Second post in a day, very unusual for me…… Another story on the BBC News Website says that the NHS (that’s the UK’s free health service) has successfully sued a private drug manufacturing company for price fixing. Now I know, I don’t claim to understand how the socialist thought process works but, here’s how I understand the story, and I’m sure people will put me right ifI get the facts wrong (I’ll probably also get corrected if the facts are right).

There is a private drug company, who makes a type of drug and sells this drug as a private comapny for the benefit of its share holders. Now, previously, according to this article, when a patent expires on a medcine, the drug traditionally gets cheaper, however in this instance the drug company chose not to lower its prices. Now in my mind, since this is a company owned wholly by the shareholders, I would have thought that this is a decision to be made by the owners of the company, since as the owners of the company would imply that anything that the company chooses to produce, remains the property of that company to dispose of in anyway that the shareholders see fit to do so.

Well, apparently not, this private compnay that chooses to privately produce this drug, has been successfully sued by the UK Government for £4.5 Million Pounds (approx. $8 Million US) because they didn’t drop their prices and were therefore taking part in anti-competitive behaviour.

I’m sorry.. run that one by me again…. So the government has been able to successfully sue a private company because it didn’t like the prices of the products it sold ….. does that mean I can sue my local grocery store because I don’t like the prices it sells its baked beans for? People will argue that it’s different for drugs and pharmaceutical products, but I fail to see how the principles differ. Surely if the patent expires this means that anyone is able to produce the drug in question without penalty, this makes the anti-competitive aspect make even less sense, since there is surely an even wider potential supply base of the drug….

Someone please explain to me how this is not goverment control of private industry…. sounds like the beginnnings of another type of government often found in Eastern Europe?

Instant fines for serving drunks

A story on BBC News website today details plans on how the UK government proposes to get tough on under-age drinking and establishments serving those who are already “too drunk”. This is another example of the great marketing machine at work, everyone who lives in or around a town center, or works near a town center in the evenings will have already seen examples of the scenes that Mr Blair intends to tackle. The thing that everyone fails to grasp about the new “tough on crime” policies is that the Police are so incredibly under staffed and under resourced that there is absolutely no chance of it having any kind of useful impact on the problem.

In actual fact when the new fines are investigated further, the more likely outcome is that when a licensed establishment becomes known for serving underage drinkers, it is more likely that a the offending premises will get an £80 fine on the spot, which will enable the police to forget about any further investigation into the issue, since the matter has “been dealt with”.

Every few weeks the government issues new ways to get tough on crime, pilots the schemes in a few areas, publishes a new set of figures, and proudly announces the new measures to be a resounding success.

Anyone not living in surburbia and the countryside that gets to see these problems first hand will already know that things have become significantly worse and no better over the last few years, the police are under resourced and totally unmotivated. The new measures like all of those previously announced need to be taken with a pinch of salt, or to be fairer, I’ll believe it when I see it make a difference, until then we’ll consider it more hot air from parliament.