However, rationalization of greed is very powerful and there is little reason to believe that such efforts (which represent more of an effort to preserve extreme levels of inequality and injustice than reduce them) would change anything.
Restrictions on regulation of financial services embedded within the 1997-1998 additions to the GATS would, by themselves, prohibit the channeling of increased profits to any specific use, as that is clearly a new regulatory action, as opposed to liberalisation, and so is arguably blocked by a freeze in new financial regulation, which could be challenged by an effected party, and rolled back by a WTO tribunal, if seen to adversely effect profits. This danger has been hanging over the ACA since its beginning, and is likely to be triggered by selling one policy over state lines because this is the principal request of foreign nations to the WTO and United States, as a precondition to entering our market to sell insurance. (See http://www.citizen.org/documents/PresidentialWTOreport.pdf and citizen.org/documents/usa.pdf.)
The addition of this "Global New Deal" therefore must be seen in its true context, a response to rising calls to carve out public services of general application broadly - effectively ending what amounts to a backlash against the rising standards of living and the emergence of a large middle class, which really came into its own in both developed and developing countries in the 20th century.
The push therefore is more of an effort to make an illegitimate system seem legitimate, really a global coup as a response to improvements in global communication and a widespread loss of faith in what is becoming a culture of governmental impunity, than anything else. It won't help anything and instead will feed into a set of unrealistic expectations held by a great many groups that problems that are not being solved will be solved, a bad thing that creates a dangerous situation when the promised goals fail to materialize, leaving everybody with their hands tied by byzantine international laws that create a dysfunctional state of lock-in into irreversible deals that are not working. Additionally, these deals seem likely to hijack an urgent need to maintain flexibility in the face of global climate change, instead hijacking immigration reform into a corporate agenda, which could result to a backlash against "immigrants" (despite the Mode Four programs, as they are called specifically being labeled as "non-immigration" - more of a loophole around limits on work visas than an actual fact. For more on this "movement of natural persons" agenda, which could end up representing a huge step backwards for labor rights, see "Legalizing Human Trafficking" CorpWatch).
So, as we see, there are two sides to the GATS healthcare agenda to make healthcare more profitable again, replacing workers here with a new kind of powerless guest worker who could not question insurer decisions, in a lower tier of healthcare where accountability chains stretched overseas (GATS also requires cross licensing of foreign professionals) or shipping patients elsewhere "Patient Mobility".
However, we could not expect lowering costs on the supply end to solve the systemic structural problems, as it's explicitly forbidden to force corporations to apply increased profits to reduce medical-loss ratios, etc., by WTO law, which the US was the chief advocate for in the 1990s (this is because health insurance is explicitly denoted by the US as a financial service, and explicitly included as a covered service under the GATS, a standstill therefore applies to it - as well as to other financial services like banking! - a little-known gotcha that could bite us quite severely, and also which it can be seen both parties are eager to cover up).
This dishonesty clearly illustrates what I think needs to be recognized as the inherently "criminogenic" aspects of trade deals generally, especially trade deals involving what Americans and Europeans see as public services (even if the WTO and increasingly corrupt US government does not see them that way; that's a framing that the public has been deceived on).
Any back-room agreement that creates "lock-ins" on what a government can do is "criminogenic" (in GATS case it requires that they continually eliminate regulations on international trade or that could make their domestic markets less profitable for foreign investment, and, NO MATTER WHAT THE COSTS TO THEIR PEOPLE OF THESE CHANGES, they must be always in the deregulatory direction!).
So, what we see is lying on a massive scale by both parties.
GATS - driving a tendency to make promises they know they cannot keep by politicians hoping to get elected - is poison for good government because its HIDING requires governments perform a sort of skit, a state of dysfunction that must be simulated to explain their failure to ever do anything.
It's clear that the world would be far better served by an end to the portions of the GATS and similar more-recent agreements that overlap with "services", which clearly need a non-commercial emphasis to avoid becoming unavailable to the vast majority of humanity as automation replaces much human labor, resulting in extreme levels of unemployment globally unless education can be made public so that people without large savings can afford to educate their children to the increasingly advanced level - for example, in the pure sciences, even postdocs have difficulties gaining permanent positions without having published significant papers in their fields.
Rather than push a great many people into employment where its likely they will fail, we should attempt to make it easier to live decently on very small amounts of money, by making certain services, such as healthcare, universal, of high quality, and completely free. This would allow the preservation, otherwise, of the multilateral trading system.
Healthcare, water, and education are particularly important. It's already impossible for many parents to find ways to fund an adequate education for a child, which may soon involve eight or more years of college, plus several years of unpaid internships or postgraduate study, until they can gain employment. Funding this will become a more and more difficult without large amounts of money. What will happen if only the wealthy can pursue college is the process of granting degrees will become fraudulent and subject to high levels of corruption. This is already a serious problem in a number of countries.
Looking ahead, it is impossible to see any system of illogic that could justify this system we are forcing nations (especially our own) into. This path we see is an example of why (amoral) corporations should never be allowed to take over the world as they are doing, especially not under the aegis of the United States, a country with a stated goal of advancing democracy is instead advancing a system dedicated to its undoing.
This is the global value-chains approach advocated by the multilateral-trading system, which justifies everything in terms of profit and losses to the Gross National Product.
This is incredibly inefficient and results in a system that its own people largely cannot win. Healthcare is a prime example of this.
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