home > education center > health care How the FTAA could affect Health Care If you like HMOs, you'll love the FTAA. What's the FTAA? A new global trade agreement than, if completed, could give global corporations the power to: Weaken health care quality standards. Increase the number of patients a nurse has to care for. Undercut health and safety laws in hospitals and health care facilities. Further privatize health care and make it harder to create an efficient, publicly coordinated health care system in the future. The FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), and CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement)--are all being negotiated behind closed doors. But we have time to stop them, until 2005. Learn what you can do by calling 773-583-7728 or info@peoplesconsultation.org. How could global trade agreements hurt health care? Right now, US laws and regulations protect us when we need health care. For example: Licensing laws make sure that doctors, nurses, and technicians are qualified and competent. Staffing ratios limit how many patients nurses have to care for. Labor laws limit the hours that health care workers have to work. Health and safety laws make sure hospitals are safe places. People won these protections through years of organizing and hard work. But under the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), and CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement): Foreign corporations and governments could challenge U.S. health care regulations as "more burdensome than necessary." For example, laws requiring reasonable staffing ratios, use of safe needles, and professional licensing could be challenged using new rules on "domestic regulation." Who decides what's "burdensome?" Three corporate trade experts deliberating in private and backed up with a powerful enforcement system. Workers and patients would have no right to watch the proceedings or present their perspective. In almost every case decided under the WTO (World Trade Organization) and NAFTA trade tribunal system to date, corporate interests have won and the public interest has lost. Rules on the temporary entry of workers could allow transnational corporations to bring immigrant workers into a country just to work in a particular hospital. Workers would have to leave the country if they were fired, so they would have no bargaining power to insist on decent treatment and fair wages. These rules would cut down wages, safety, and unions in the whole health care industry. WTO staff have stated that one of the aims of these rules is to lower labor costs. The "national treatment" rule in the proposed agreements could further privatize health care. Governments would have to treat private health care corporations from abroad just as favorably as public service providers based in the U.S. This could give foreign corporations an "equal right" to money that we now use to fund public services in the U.S. That would make it harder to save public hospitals and clinics, or create an efficient, publicly coordinated health care system in the future. For more information see www.asje.org.