The joint venture between Vodafone and Vivendi Universal cost some euro1.6 billion ($1.4 billion) to set up but has attracted fewer subscribers than hoped for and has had trouble making money.Investor indifference met Vivendi Universal's stockmarket offer of a 5% stake in the company.
"It would be helpful to agree on three of four priorities that we're all going to work on … At the moment we're all using different statistics, so we're working on what we hope will be a universal cost benefit analysis [of providing integrated services]." Kevin Mulvenna, senior policy officer at Bristol city council, says this would help.
Pressplay, the company's joint venture to sell digital music with Vivendi Universal, cost the company an estimated $30 million over a year and a half and generated little more than bad press before it was sold.
The group is also calling on a universal cost-benefit analysis of all aspects of prehospital care.
At a time of universal cost containment policies, there is growing evidence that high workload or low staffing level increases the risk for negative patient outcomes [ 11, 12], such as death [ 13] and nosocomial infection [ 12, 14- 16].
As total gametocyte density should closely correlate with parasite fitness in this system [ 32- 34], these data suggest that the increase in immune-mediated mortality incurred a universal cost to parasite fitness.
Bolton at Home, which controls council housing in Bolton, calculates that supporting tenants on universal credit costs five times more than tenants on legacy benefits.
The concordance between intrahost variation and patterns of conservation across HIV-1 group M hints at universal fitness costs of mutations.
Eric Elton, M.D. Evanston, Ill., June 15 To the Editor: Universal coverage, cost control and quality medical care are essential but insufficient to achieve good health in our nation.
