The Nation's Health Worker's Safety

By Phil E. Benjamin

People's Weekly World

How can you write a lead article for The New York Times on health systems in Europe ("Health Care Gap Has Britain Looking Abroad") without even mentioning the privatization pressure from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and their political apparatus, the World Trade Organization?

The article didn't even include a short mention of the crisis in U.S. health care, where 45 million are without any health insurance and another 60 million with such drastically little health insurance coverage that it only guarantees low-quality health services.

What we are told, again and again, ad nauseum, is the litany of shortcomings of the British National Health Service and the failures of German and French health insurance systems.

We hear heart-wrenching stories about individuals who had to wait for health care services, while in the United States well over 50 million people will never receive health care. (The article also failed to mention that the World Health Organization labelled the French National Health Insurance System, which is fundamentally a public system, as the best in the world.)

Financial strangulation

In each of these countries, Social Democratic leaders - Blair in UK, Jospan in France, and Schroeder in Germany, bowing to WTO, IMF and WB dictates - are trying in every diabolical way to turn their public health systems over to for-profit insurance and drug transnationals.

But, in each country, labor and people's movements have resisted and successfully stopped the wholesale selling off of these pro-people systems. The only recourse that these three misleaders have to pay off their globalization supporters is to financially strangle the budgeting of health services, hence the long wait for services. The same anti-people strategies are taking place in the conservatively run Canadian system. This is their attempt to destroy public confidence in their system.

Although this trickery has influenced some opinions in the United States, people in these countries are not buying into it. They know the difference between structural failure and anti-people policies that are defunding their health systems so they cannot work properly.

Many Europeans have relatives and keep track of the for-profit health care system in the United States and they don't want it. This is especially true for Canadians.

Hold them responsible

The greed of international capitalists at its sharpest and crudest when they try to destroy health systems that, on an everyday basis, help people stay alive and without illness.

Their inhuman behavior is dramatically shown when they insist that public medical and health systems turn their assets over to Aetna, Cigna and other profit making insurance carriers.

Not satisfied with that, they turn to the pricing of prescription drugs.

Here, the WTO is on a full-scale war to end individual European government negotiations with international drug cartels on their drug pricing in those countries. These negotiations keep drug prices within the reach of all people in those countries.

The WTO wants to force individuals to pay the "market" price for their much needed drugs. There is not much of a difference between the actions of the WTO and their notorious WB and IMF partners and the Nazi doctors who played with people's health care. Why not put these international capitalists on trial?