The Ability of People With Pre-Existing Conditions And their Families to Purchase Health Care In the Non-Group Market, as well as All The Other Positive Changes Since 1998 (all of Obamacare's Good Parts) As Well As Our Nation's Ability To Choose What Kind of Heallthcare We Have In Any Election, (Blocking Single Payer, and Virtually Any Other Cost Saving Measure, Unless Its More Profitable) IS IN DANGER, All New Regulations Since 1998 Could Be Reversed And Regulations of Health Insurance "Rolled Back" to 1998 Levels. (Or eliminated by requiring global changes that could have a great many unanticipated effects- such as making it so poor people with chronic illnesses had to leave the country to get affordable care, at a time when many jobs will be going away, for good.)
How?
As far as rolling back new regulations, this is how- See where it says "Standstill" - start reading there. The document below freezes regulations that don't conform at their levels on February 26, 1998. Thats simple to understand. Later than February 26,1998, potentially voidable. Pre-existing, less so. (but still subject to MANY gotchas, as we discovered in 1998 with the Glass-Steagall Act which allegedly "had to" be repealed - and cannot be redone, because of other provisions in GATS) For the best overview of the healthcare situation, read this.
Understanding on Committments in Financial Services
(Image by screenshot, from WTO with annotation not copyrighted) Details DMCA
In the Presidential debate recently, when asked what he would do to improve healthcare, Donald Trump's first response, was the suggestion that we allow the sale of one health care policy in all 50 states. Unfortunately that would lead to a major disaster in health care in the US, one which would be totally irreversible since we signed the GATS agreement as part of our entry into the WTO in 1995. A signing of the pending TISA agreement, whose negotiations are almost completed in Geneva, might also have the same effect.
The expensive portions of the ACA may be seen as WTO-illegal, because for example, they are new regulations on financial services, when the stanstill was supposed to limit nonconforming regulations to ones that already existed on that date. And you will see below, and dont forget it, the WTO is above all national bodies. (Obama was lying to Elizabeth Warren, because its embarassing to admit that you are not top dog any more, it seems every year some new trade agreement comes out (this year it seems we're getting five or six) But this is one we already have thats been there since 1995, but parts - for example, the specifics of what services the countries plan to trade, and how the various rules will apply to them "disciplines on domestic regulation" just are not finished yet. But many many rules exist- and are binding and have been since the 1990s. Gradually a body of new law is being created. And its not exaggerating to say that this agreement is a uniquely horrid one for people. Its arguably caused 20 years of health care dysfunction, which we have been lied to about, and also quite arguably (experts say this) indirectly caused a huge financial crisis that effected the whole world and cost American families trillions of dollars, by forcing the repeal of the "Glass-Steagall Act" a body of financial rules that protected the US taxpayer from irresponsible banking practices that GATS was claimed to require the repeal of..)
Regulations must also be eliminated if they are "more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service" (for example, poorer patients could be sent elsewhere - say Mexico or India, for care cheaper, availing themselves of the services of our trading partners, instead of forcing US insurers to cover them-thats a much more trade restrictive approach than the least burdensome one necessary to insure the quality of the service. (perhaps shipping patients overseas for care, or caring for them here with foreign doctors, who arent necessarily worse doctors, just less independent, US doctors often will discuss things with insurance challenged patients that insurers dont want to pay for, without getting the insurers permission in advance, and delisting isnt always enough of a threat to make them toe the line. This will fix that) . GATS and TISA change everything involving services, from ones where the government is involved to market based solutions. And the market when the government is involved may not discriminate in favor of a US or local provider if there is better value elsewhere.
The wage situation in countries like the US is seen as a trade barrier, if foreign firms must obey it. Therefore TISA's goal like GATS before it, is also to "harmonize" US and other developed countries regulations, food regulations, chemical and endocrine disruptor, pesticides, safety, etc. finding the lowest common denominators and nailing rules there. Once wages here are the same as they are elsewhere, the problem of illegal immigration will cease in an inward direction.
GATS Mode Four was not by any means the first of a number of treaty temporary guest workers deals. They go back thousands of years. Several are in the pipeline and they are expected to be popular with multinationals. But its highly questionable practice morally, a type of program that has often been compared to slavery. That will - its its intent, push wages down, in a "race to the bottom" See my last article- it needs some typos corrected but the idea is clear. )The reasons this health care capture disaster would happen are detailed in four easy to download documents. I suggest that you download them so you can refer to them as we go along. Basically, the roots of the problem go back more than 20 years to the Glinton Administration and the first few years of our entry into the WTO.
click here (Nicholas Skala's 2009 paper in the International Journal of Health Services is the only one on the subject, and if you read it, by the time you are 2/3 done you'll likely be amazed at how much we have never been told. As you can see the entire debate has been misleading as to the real causes of health care gridlock, at best, If we followed Trump and the GOP's suggestions, due to GATS we would swiftly lose our health policy freedom to a trap created during the former Clinton Administration,
If petitioned, the WTO could and would roll back "nonconforming" domestic financial services regulation after 1998, which includes Obamacare, for reasons which are enumerated best in the Skala paper, which include one catch all clause, something called a standstill, which basically is a freeze.. leaving a significant portion of the country - the families who have at least one member with a chronic health condition- with no affordable way to buy even high deductible health insurance. )
BUT, SINGLE PAYER will have been stopped for good, forever, unless we subsequently buy our freedom at tremendous cost, (via the intentionally expensive GATS Article XXI manumission procedure) so I am sure they will be congratulating one another.
And not a peep in the media.
www.maine.gov/legis/opla/ctpchlthcaresub.pdf (This shows the problem a state, Maine ran into when they tried to offer health insurance to their poorer residents, they concluded that it exposed them to suits under the WTO GATS agreement, and that TISA would make the situation substantially worse)
Canada's Approach To Keeping Their Single Payer System is Keeping health care Completely Free of Money. But that has worked in part because Canada's single payer system was already pre-existing when GATS was signed in 1994. The Dates these horrible things are signed (This applies to the Pending 3Ts,and others like the newly proposed TFS too) has special significance because they give corporations rights to ownership of policy that effectively begin and often, give them a legal ownership to view as sort of a ceiling, the state of regulation at that time. Regulations subsequently, can only be reduced, never increased.
(The only way Canada has avoided a similar fate is to have instituted their single payer health system decades before the WTO agreement was signed, allowing it to be grandfathered in, and also by keeping it completely free, avoiding the pitfall of Article I:3(b) and (c)
There is a bunch of additional background info at
www.citizen.org/documents/PresidentialWTOreport.pdf (This is also quite informative and the references are invaluable)
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