Marie O' Connor has posted an excellent article on the probable if not certain effects of privatisation on cancer care in Ireland. US companies are already well stuck in - at the behest and encouragement of Mary Harney and her husband Brian Geoghegan - who has, incidentally, been at least as much if not more involved than his wife in privatising the health service.

MOC's article here:

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/87885

On another thread which I can't find right now, someone denied that smear tests were being sent to the US. In fact they have been and will continue to be. Harney is closing down labs and throwing desperately needed and highly qualified people on the unemployment heap so as to facilitate this destruction.

She knows perfectly well that these decisions will cost lives - and presumably as with Madeleine Albright about the half million Iraqi children who died because of sanctions, she also thinks this is price worth paying. There is surely a criminal dimension to this, no?

This further comment on that Indymedia article truly nails the lie:


"Centres of excellence seem to be a backdoor mechanism for approving public-private-partnership, with their whole system of dubious and opaque accounting. PPP revolves around some absurd accounting of future value: a private partner will typically be guaranteed a 12% per annum return on their initial investment, an indemnity from the financial consequences of failure (hence a publicly funded typical cost over-run of three times the initial costing), the right to dictate service contract terms (maintenance, cleaning, security, expansion, etc) for periods of up to 45 years and a 4% per annum depreciation on asset value (i.e. they are compensated for a 4% per year decline in land and buildings, which in reality increase in value by 8% per annum over those timescales).

There is an entire futures market where private partners trade their interests in PPP projects for astronomical values, often immediately after winning the tender and before contributing any work."

Very interesting indymedia thread Aragon. Duly bookmarked.
The point about PPPs is an important one in this context as it makes no fiscal sense and cannot be improved beyond its guaranteed minimum levels. There's more than enough evidence of this now, despite 'commercial confidentiality'.

With regard to colocation and the privatisation of cancer care. The writing was on the wall that this would be a costly scam to global health care corporations. The HSE is a completely corporate-loaded body from it's inception (something I pointed out on the health care efficiency thread)*.


(The thread also contains a study which found that when medicare in the US used investor owned for-profit health care, costs and bureaucracy increased dramatically over the previous non-profit system.)

*
the-fallacy-of-private-health-care-efficiency-



http://www.jabfm.org/cgi/content/full/16/5/443

Figure 1. Private insurer’s high overhead. Investor-owned plans are
worst. Source: Schramm, Blue Cross conversion, Abell Foundation, and
CMS.


from this post here

There was a half page ad in our local paper today with lists of symptoms and an invitation to pop in to a private hospital for cancer care - how can this have anything to do with building up critical mass of patients in specialist centres of excellence ?

I sometimes wonder if FF and the PDs are not running down the health service on purpose so that they can privatise as much of it as possible with the least possible complaint.

Am I missing something here? Was the original post not about the effect of privatisation on cancer care as opposed to the privatisation of cancer care?

I ask only because I've heard Tom Keane speak about the cancer strategy in depth and I have no recollection of any mention of privatisation in terms of centres of excellence - so I'm not sure where Máire is going with that connection.

I'd be glad if someone could clarify that for me. As it stands it seems to me that there are a couple of different tunes playing here at the same time...one about centres of excellence, one about privatisation of healthcare in general and another regarding private cancer care. They don't necessarily overlap.

And I would have thought that the Barringtons experience would be enough to make the general public very wary of private cancer care, though not wary enough to actually find out what centres of excellence promise and why they're better than a piddling inefficient service in a local hospital.

*bumpety bump*

http://www.limerickleader.ie/news/Breast-cancer-Patient-A-calls.4291933.jp

Patient A is calling for changes in the law on Private Hospital treatment.