IT WAS opened proudly by Scottish Secretary lain Lang - and closed by market forces.
Just six months after it opened, the most expensive private hospital in Britain has called in the receivers.
The Clydebank-based Health Care International conceded defeat when they could not find bankers willing to bail out this year's expected £15 million deficit on the lavish £180 million hospital complex, £30m of which had been underwritten by the Tory government.
Glasgow's Evening Times has had fun listing all the ways £30m could have been spent to benefit Scotland's NHS.
But while the opposition of the Scottish public to the new hospital project was vocal and predictable, it is hard to see why bankers were prepared even to contemplate such a reckless and ludicrous scheme. In the midst of the rampant sleaze debate, questions are being asked about where some of the money went.
The hospital cost almost three times as much to build as a district general hospital for the NHS, but has only 260 beds. Yet it also has 21 operating theatres, compared with just five in an equivalent sized NHS specialist hospital. There is an attached 160-bed luxury hotel, which always depended upon the success of the hospital.
in theory the Clydebank hospital was to act as a magnet, drawing in lucrative specialist cases from the wealthy elite of the Middle East, Greece and Italy.
But the number of overseas patients using British private hospitals has slumped in recent years to just 3 percent of the British private market. Most of these go to prestigious London hospitals. whose names are already established.
It turns out that to make a profit the Clydebank hospital would have needed to attract a third of all the overseas private patients treated in Britain.
Attempts to diversity by pulling in cash and contracts from health authorities in Britain failed to make any substantial dent in the rampant debts of the doomed operation.
When the firm went bellyup there were just 20 patients in the £180m hospital.
As the boss of the Independent Health Care Association told the Financial Times "The trouble is that it is too big, it is in the wrong place, and it opened at the wrong time".
Now MPs from the Puhlic Accounts Committee are to probe the investment of £30m of government cash in what has become known as the Scottish De Lorean, while Greater Glasgow Health Board seeks to close 1,000 NHS beds.
Like the failed car firm, HCI promised to create jobs. But instead of the projected 1,800, only 400 staff were employed, just 53 of them from Clydebank.
THE CRUSHING electoral defeat SOCIALIST OUTLOOK: No.72, November 19 1994, Page 3