Global Health Watch 1 in one file

Report cautioned that ‘few countries (with either high or low income) have
developed adequate strategies to regulate the private financing and provision
of health services’ and that ‘the harm caused by market abuses is difficult to
remedy after the fact’ (WHO 2000). The same caution should be applied to education,
and especially to water and sanitation – where, as described in Part D,
chapter 2, privatization experiences of the last decade have generated intense
political resistance because of their negative effects on the poor.
GATS does not directly drive privatization, but functions as a trap-door that
locks in existing (and future) levels of private provision of services. It may also
indirectly create incentives for foreign investors and their actual or prospective
host country joint-venture partners to lobby for privatization, because of
the security it provides for investments in newly privatized services. The GATS
exception for ‘a [government] service which is supplied neither on a comthe
government. The declared intent of Canadian federal and provincial
governments to prohibit international trade in water (primarily to the US)
may be in violation of NAFTA (Shrybman 1999); states bordering the Great
Lakes are currently drafting legislation to permit commercial diversion of
water from the basin despite Canada’s opposition, arguing that NAFTA
gives them the right to do so. Of course, Canadian companies have also
used Chapter 11 to challenge regulations in the US. Methanex Corporation,
a Canadian-based producer of the gasoline additive MTBE, a suspect
carcinogen, is suing for US$ 970 million because California banned its
use in 1999.
With respect to health care, NAFTA provides that governments can expropriate
foreign-owned investments only for a public purpose and if they
provide compensation. This opens the door to NAFTA claims that measures
to expand public health insurance in Canada (where prescription drugs,
home care and dental care are currently privately insured), or to restrict
private for-profit provision of health care services, amount to expropriation
and that compensation must be paid to US or Mexican investors who are
adversely affected.
From a health vantage point, NAFTA’s Chapter 11 should be rescinded.
Article 15 of the Chapter on Investment in the agreement on the FTAA,
which would similarly allow investor-state suits, should be deleted. And
no such provision should ever be adopted in the multilateral agreements
administered by the WTO.
Health for all in a ‘borderless world’?
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