The subsized part of your health insurance scheme will come under pressure. The law of subsidies and countervailing measures in the WTO is different for "pre-existing" "measures" - (basically everything a government 'does' all laws or policies or - any change is a measure- See also the text of the Understanding on Commitments in Financial Services - discussed here in the context of the US - If the UK signed it, remember
health insurance is a financial service- So everything that was existing - the free aspect of the NHS insurance, which because its also sold in the UK, was always going to be phased out, (unless it was entirely free, like Canada) you only got to continue doing
only as long as it didn't change - will likely come under such extreme pressure only a miracle of public outcry and preparation could prevent. Otherwise it will be you, not the WTO that is forced to change and the cost to indiuvidual Britons will be in the high six figures or low seven figures over each of your lifetimes (as it is here) Or, poor people will be farmed out internationally for care. (Thats what they want but wont say it. They want poor people to leave).
Instead, barring a change in (all of our) our public's understanding of the WTO and its progeny - needed to also understand similar "plurilateral" services agreements, and a concerted effort to prevent this otherwise inevitable outcome, it will happen and people will blame it on democracy which we will not realize, hasn't existed in a long time. (Instead we have gotten post-hoc rationalization, or political reverse engineering of already-decided outcomes- i.e. manipulation.)
This issue surrounding public services, is a major beef people all around the world have with the WTO and multilateral trading system model, but unless you have some warning of it and that this is coming, you'll likely not realize that.
There is a
discussion about these issues and the fact that its the wrong model thats being aspired to, from a British NGO, Save the Children in this publication.
So instead of the WTO needing to change this, exempting all of the public services, for everybody, in the future (a change it needs in order to even aspire to legitimacy) you'll fall into the trap thats likely being set. And then the rest of the world likely will too.
As you're a wealthy country you likely wont be allowed to extensively subsidize health care as you had been in the past, unless you carved it out completely in your schedule before it was drawn up. Which as far as I know was not done in 1995/1998 - I suspect you went the route the US did and tried to commit as much as you could to one way privatization, even knowing that the public would never have voted for it. You could find out by going to the WTO web site and looking up your own country's specific commitments documents. (They have an SC in their titles) from (approximately) 1994-1998, especially. Look up howto read a services schedule as well.
But the poor countries which want the business, they want the patients, which represent themselves as having been told that trade like that is their payback, wont let you do that. (Don't buy in to this North vs. South frame - the real battle is between the oligarchs -who are stealing the planet's entire bright future and all the gains given us by technology- and everybody else) So it has to be called out then and there, but barring any discussion it wont be.
The poor country oligarchs are being quiet now but they will jump into action as soon as the change becomes irreversible.
Whenever a government is paying a portion of the insurance money, its likely to have a expiration date. Because as the 'market' is perfect, it can't be reformed, only countries that deviate from it's pure state must reform. Sounds a bit like a cult, huh? Well it is.
At least it screams cult-like-danger signs to me. (Here is what it is: '
groupthink')
https://www.allysonpollock.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/BMJ_2003_Pollock_NewDealWTO.pdfhttps://www.allysonpollock.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/BMJ_2002_Price_ExtendingChoiceNHS.pdfhttps://www.allysonpollock.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lancet_2002_Pollock_MarketForces.pdfhttps://www.allysonpollock.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lancet_1999_Price_WTODomesticPolicies.pdfThe NHS is heavily privatised already. Most of the major organisations are shell companies / PFI / state run entirely backed with contractors, suppliers and permanent staff. There isn't really much of a public healthcare system, only the top level organisational stuff, property, data and logistics.
Do you have any idea how much we Americans pay for our health care? Or of how arbitrarily expensive and unpredictable it is, so much so that sick people of all income levels, are rightfully terrified to utilize it?
Don't fall into the mistake of thinking the propaganda about private health care being better is accurate. Its not true. Also, dont be misled into thinking that most (more than half of the wage earners) people can afford it, (it meaning adequate coverage to prevent their being bankrupted by a serious illness) that has not been true here in the US since the 1980s!
Example of problems (old site) at one well connected HMO (which are now common elsewhere in the US - our healthcare is being aggressively attenuated with the result being millions of people never getting treatment they have been paying for, denial of tests and diagnosis, and a huge increase in so called iatrogenic injury, preventable hospital accidents, now the third highest cause of death in the US.This has mostly been a positive progression however because the rationale behind it was to make parts of the NHS accountable to someone.
Privatization does the exact opposite. And the globalization aspect of it is likely to make providers even more unaccountable.
A government 100% can't be accountable to itself and you can't realistically sue a government as an individual. If you spin the providers off then you can separate responsibility (hospitals and trusts) and quality (NHS England) which reduces corruption and increases standards (which is actually statistically evident since this restructuring).
Now that doesn't mean that healthcare has a cost or it is a free market, but it does mean that the companies have to be transparent to the government agencies.
It wont continue because the market issupposed to determine quality. Under the cult ideology its natural for people who pay less to get much less. Its their due for being poor.
Prior to this arrangement, quality was unknown, no one was accountable and many many lives were destroyed with no recourse.
I think people forgot the old British public sector energy, postal and transport systems and how absolutely bloody awful they were and how things have improved.
WTO has nothing to do with this either way.
I suspect you're reading totally different data than I am, and seeing the issue from a radically different perspective because the alternative to public health care where everybody is in and everybody is in the same system is healthcare for some but not for others. Once you give up the universal healthcare guarantee and let the wealthy buy out of the system, then they no longer are there keeping quality up, also the WTO rules kick in and privatize whats left. You likely don't know how many Americans are dying because they never get health care, or get it only long after they should have.
The statistics are found using the terms "excess deaths" "mortality amendable to improved access to health care" and "mortality amendable to healthcare".
Everything changed in September 1986 when at the Punta Del Este conference in Uruguay 'services' were put on the table in whats represented as a grand compromise to get the Global South nations to play the trading game. But methinks they doth protest too much. It really was all staged. Its a colossal global con job by the biggest con artists in the world, the insiders among insiders, to take the pressure off of them to change in a world where inequality is increasing exponentially.
The oligarchs are joining forces everywhere to gut the voices of democracy which the world needs more now than ever.
The huge effort being put into suppressing the voices and needs of humanity with divide and conquer tactics by putting forward a fake 'rules based system' that only increases inequality is a huge mistake.
Let me bow out of this now. I am sorry for this explanation. But I had to explain what I meant.
This has little if anything to do with backdoors.
There is a good discussion of hardware and software backdoors which I have been meaning to read more of at
https://blog.invisiblethings.com and related web sites. The article on stateless laptop hardware in particular I thought was interesting.
I wonder if backdoors may already exist and if so they were likely put there by the top level (chip manufacturing) corporations to service the never ending requests I am sure they likely get from countries of all kinds.
Using open hardware - making and using open hardware may be an important way to slow down this attack on security.
But it may not be enough, witness the never ending security holes and backdoor like software problems which have emerged recently. I suspect that a new layer of hardware beneath the OSs and things which are known may in newer HW be tagging along for the ride.
The disclosures about security holes may just be the tip of an iceberg or not. I don't know.
I certainly am hoping it isn't.
But without knowing the political and economic contexts driving the wagon encircling and ladder up-pulling in high places we have no chance of understanding what may be happening, if indeed anything is happening, to hardware and software.
This context certainly is an important thing to know that isn't known. Because that question boils down to, are we living in real democracies, or not?