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Govind Rao

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR - Infomart - 0 views

www.fpinfomart.ca/...193890450

from heather ontario accord

shared by Govind Rao on 16 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Brockville Recorder and Times Wed Apr 16 2014
  • THE PUSH TO PRIVATIZE To the editor:" As of April 1st there was no more Health Accord. No, this is not an April Fools joke. By the time you read this, Canada's Health Accord will be history. This 10-year agreement between the federal and provincial governments came to an end on March 31st. The Health Accord promoted national standards. It required public administration, universal access, comprehensive coverage, accessibility without extra charges or discrimination, and portability across provinces. It committed the federal and provincial governments to a set of common goals around wait times, home care, prescription drugs and team-based primary care. It provided stable funding, and increased federal funding from 10 per cent to 20 per cent. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has refused to negotiate another accord. He has made a unilateral decision without discussions with the provinces or debate in parliament. The Harper government will cut health care funding and let provinces go their own way, with no national goals or commitment to uphold national standards. This will lead to 13 different health care systems and more privatization.
  • The six per cent a year increase in transfers will stop after 2017. From then on the health transfers will be tied to economic growth with a three per cent floor, in spite of increases in population and in the number of seniors. Some provinces will receive less federal funding with no tax points or adjustments for a province's lack of wealth. Over a 10-year period, the federal share of health care will shrink to a small fraction of its original 50 per cent -down to 18.6 per cent by 2024 alone. Over a 10-year period the federal contribution will be $36 billion less. With the carrot of federal cash down, the federal government will be less able to uphold the Canada Health Act. It is clear. Mr. Harper wants health care to be privatized. Then we would have lower taxes but far larger medical bills. This is OK for the very rich, but devastating for everyone else. It is all part of his neoliberal ideology. He thinks that in some magical way this privatization will benefit everyone, and those who believe in magic support him. JIM RIESBERRY, BROCKVILLE
Govind Rao

What does NDP's landslide victory in Alberta say about single payer? | Physicians for a... - 0 views

www.pnhp.org/...alberta-say-about-single-payer

from heather medicare US Alberta

shared by Govind Rao on 08 May 15 - No Cached
  • By Dave DormerCalgary Sun, April 29, 2015
  • Restoring a $1 billion cut to funding and eliminating personal levies is the prescription to fixing an ailing health care system, NDP leader Rachel Notley said Wednesday.
  • “That is a private clinic behind me and that is what Jim Prentice has in mind for you and your family,” she said while campaigning in southwest Calgary. “That is what a billion-dollar health care cutback leads to and I have a fundamental problem with private clinic health care.
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  • “Private clinic health care is about building a two-tier system where the wealthy, the people who Jim Prentice and his friends represent, can pay to jump to the head of the line instead of treating people on the basis of need.” Notley said private clinics draw resources away from the public health care system, ultimately undermining it.
  • Comment: By Don McCanne, MD The landslide victory for the New Democratic Party (NDP) in Alberta appears to represent not only a shift to supporting progressive values and away from Prime Minister Stephen Harper's conservative politics, but it also appears to be an endorsement of NDP's strong support of Alberta's single payer health program, with a rejection of recent trends in privatization of their system.
  • Lest the victors not become too smug and complacent, it should be pointed out that the progressives (New Democratic Party) received 41 percent of the popular vote, whereas the conservatives (Progressive Conservatives and Wildrose Alliance Party) received a combined 52 percent of the vote. (This may represent an oversimplification since some would label Harper's PC party as "neoliberal.")
  • Nevertheless it is reassuring to see a vote in one of Canada's most conservative provinces that seems to support their single payer public health system, while rejecting privatized two-tier health care. What lessons might there be here for the United States?
Govind Rao

Stopping the Biggest Corporate Power Grab in Years | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Vi... - 0 views

www.commondreams.org/...est-corporate-power-grab-years

from heather trade international US campaign ally

shared by Govind Rao on 07 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Tuesday, January 06, 2015
  • by Foreign Policy In Focus
  • How fighting back against one arcane, Nixon-era trade negotiating procedure could put a stop to a global corporate coup.byArthur Stamoulis
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Fifteen years later, the “movement of movements” has another opportunity to strike a dramatic blow to neoliberalism — this time by stopping the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is a deal the United States is negotiating with 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific region (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam) allegedly to boost “free trade.”
  • access to medicines
  • But labor and environmental standards are just the tip of the iceberg. The GAO studies don’t even touch upon the rules found in modern “trade” pacts’ chapters on financial services, food safety, public procurement, medicine patents, investment, and so-on, all of which the TPP would expand to an estimated 40 percent of the global economy — with a built-in mechanism to cover more countries still.
  • Given the smaller number of negotiators at the TPP table than at the WTO — and the fact that so many seem willing to sell out their nations’ public health programs, family farms, financial stability measures, and just plain sovereignty in order to cut a deal with the United States — it’s unlikely that protests in the United States are going to appeal to their sense of morality. Thus, the anti-Fast Track strategy is not only more feasible than centralized mass protest; it’s probably more effective.
  • TPP supporters and opponents alike both know that, with the U.S. presidential elections gearing up in the latter half of 2015, the window of opportunity for concluding the TPP is fast closing. Neither political party in the United States wants an unpopular trade debate on its hands while it’s trying to take the White House.
Govind Rao

How Privatization Degrades Our Daily Lives | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for ... - 0 views

www.commondreams.org/...ation-degrades-our-daily-lives

from heather privatization US

shared by Govind Rao on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Monday, March 23, 2015
  • byPaul Buchheit
  • Health Care: Markups of 100%....1,000%....100,000% 
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Broadcast Journalist Edward R. Murrow in 1955: Who owns the patent on this vaccine? Polio Researcher Jonas Salk: Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun? We don't hear much of that anymore. The public-minded sentiment of the 1950s, with the sense of wartime cooperation still in the minds of researchers and innovators, has yielded to the neoliberal winner-take-all business model. 
  • In his most recent exposé of the health care industry in the U.S., Steve Brill notes that it's "the only industry in which technological advances have increased costs instead of lowering them." An investigation of fourteen private hospitals by National Nurses United found that they realized a 1,000% markup on their total costs, four times that of public hospitals. Other sources have found that private health insurance administrative costs are 5 to 6 times higher than Medicare administrative costs. Markup reached 100,000% for the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, which grabbed a patent for a new hepatitis drug and set the pricing to take whatever they could get from desperate American patients.
Govind Rao

The Zine is Out! | Stop Veolia Seattle - 0 views

stopveoliaseattle.wordpress.com/the-zine

from heather privatization corporate research us

shared by Govind Rao on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Veolia, the largest privatizer of water globally, the largest privatizer of transportation in North America, formerly one of the main profiteers of Israeli apartheid and a company that can be traced back to Napoleon, helps us to trace the roots of today’s neoliberalism in earlier manifestations of Western imperialism and exploitation.
  • Govind Rao on 16 Nov 15
     
    thanks to Kelti Cameron
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