Question: You participated in the People’s University on Political Economy and the Right to Health, what was your experience?
Eduardo A Espinosa:In developing countries such as ours, we are going astray from the necessary achievement of development and health for All. The value of a school like that is to share experiences and to train a new generation in the struggle so that the movement for the Right to Health can be expanded and become more powerful. Inequities among people will never be reduced unless the social and economic determinants of health are also addressed.
Question: You made a very powerful intervention on the need to understand that health cannot be a commodity and you took apart the insidious ways in which our health systems are being gradually privatized. Can you sum up for us what you taught the students?
Eduardo A Espinosa :There is a radical shift in concept embedded in the logic of the health reform. The idea that producing healthy people is the true engine of the health system has been replaced with the notion that the system’s objective is to generate a profit!
The advocates of the new system are seeking to privatize just what can be made profitable in the health system. They pick and choose what they can squeeze a profit from. In El Salvador the government representatives swear that they are not privatizing the hospitals, but of course they are not putting the hospitals for sale per se, because they are not profitable. What they privatize are all the many services of the hospitals which they can privatize. Private consultations for example are developed riding on the failures of the public services to deliver, especially after several years of structural adjustment. Another path to privatization is that instead of the health budget going from the State to the Health Ministry, the budget is now managed as a Fund through the private banking system.
To get people to swallow the bitter pill by convincing them that health is a privilege instead of a fundamental human right.
