An article by John Hilary, executive director, and published in the BMJ [British Medical Journal] reminds us again of the serious and imminent risk to the National Helth Service (NHS) and therefore to the health of the population.
“Designed to meet the interests of corporations rather than patients, and imperative that it’s stopped in its tracks
“The threat to public health posed by agreements on trade liberalisation has been a topic of policy interest for many years. The outgoing UN special rapporteur for health, Anand Grover, devoted much of his final report to the UN General Assembly this autumn to highlighting how trade and investment treaties have consistently undermined the right to health.1 Yet it is only now, in the context of EU-US negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), that the health implications of free trade agreements have become a front line political concern in the UK.
“The first round of TTIP negotiations took place in July 2013. The intention remains to conclude the deal by the end of 2015, before the next US presidential election campaign begins in earnest. The talks take place in secret, with no public access to the key negotiating documents, so that almost everything we know of their content comes through leaks. The most recent round of negotiations was held at the end of September, and the serious work of drafting the treaty is now under way.
“Much interest in TTIP has focused on the inclusion of health services in the agreement, and particularly the threat to the National Health Service. The European Commission has confirmed that health services are on the table, and a leaked copy of the EU’s liberalisation offer has revealed its full ambition. Not only hospital services but medical (including midwifery and physiotherapy) and dental services are to be opened up to competition under TTIP. Individual EU member states may enter reservations to protect specific sectors, but the only one entered by the UK government is for ambulance services.
“The market liberalisation introduced by the 2012 Health and Social Care Act ensures it will be effectively impossible to take the NHS back into public hands if the EU-US deal goes through. Both the UK government and the European Commission have confirmed that TTIP’s provisions to protect investors would grant US corporations the power to sue any future administration over such a move. Many groups are now campaigning for health services to be taken off the table altogether, just as audio-visual services have been removed from the TTIP negotiations at the insistence of the French.
Potential for harm
“Yet even if health services were removed from TTIP, there are numerous other ways in which the agreement would have damaging effects on public health. To begin with, the official impact assessment commissioned by the EU at the start of the negotiations estimates that at least one million people will lose their jobs as a result of TTIP in the EU and US combined, with all the attendant health consequences. At a time of mass unemployment on both sides of the Atlantic, there is little chance of those people finding alternative work.”
Read the full article at the BMJ site
