“think about making some of the standard drugs in this country to improve supply.”

A friend was telling me earlier about the various logistical tricks that Lidl and Aldi use to reduce prices. For example, because they primarily stock own-brand products, this reduces the number of different variants/brands per product they have to source, which means they buy larger amounts from fewer suppliers. This means they can negotiate with the supplier to get them to package the product so that packaging has super prominent barcodes for easy scanning, and the boxes can go straight from a pallet onto the shelf, reducing labour. In short, by doing stuff in bulk, they have more negotiating power.

i think your point about stabilising drug supply is an example of the kind of thing the NHS could do to leverage its enormous purchasing power. I know that one of my medications is quite expensive for the NHS, but also quite widely prescribed, for example.

Tbh the tories were almost onto something with workfare but they were needlessly cruel with it. All they had to do was give a living wage out of it rather than barely over £1/hour to work at Argos and it would have been kinda ok.

Unemployment benefits are so low you would only have to do a single shift a week if that is what you wanted to pay them. It would essentially be a guarantee of a minimum amount of work and income regardless of circumstance, and you could cut most job centre staff to pay for it. I am sure local councils could find useful things for an already paid for labour force and it would be more useful to the community than subsidising Argos.

Or they could deal with the reasons why workers’ mental health is so bad.

Sorry, joking. I know the driving motivation is maximising profit, while minimising tax burden of the richest.