Sectorial Meeting on Health #OFIP22

Context  

Public healthcare services are vital to realise the human right to mental and physical health. However, commercial approaches to healthcare delivery, governance and financing are growing throughout the global health policy discourse. Commercialisation in health can be defined as the growth of a phenomenon where market mechanisms to the healthcare sector gain a private benefit, including health services, to make a profit.  

This threatens progress toward implementing the appropriate conditions and infrastructure necessary to realise the right to health. Civil society, unions and researchers advocating for the realisation of the right to health through strong, resilient public healthcare services are acting globally to illustrate the negative impacts of current upward trends leading to marketisation, financialisaton and commercialisation of healthcare and create strategies to invert them wherever possible.   

The problem is of sufficient importance that the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, indicated that she is “considering an examination of the role played by the privatization of health-care services – including public-private partnerships, financial aid and philanthropy – in attaining universal health coverage” in a report setting out “strategic priorities of work” for her mandate.  

The movement for public health services and against commercialization of health has been growing and new evidence has emerged over recent years. Recent research and advocacy in countries such as Uganda, India, Kenya, Nigeria, the U.S. and Italy has shown how privatisation and commercialisation of healthcare provision can create health inequities and undermine human dignity and the right to health.  Sharp inequalities in distribution and allocation of COVID-19 diagnostics, treatments and vaccines have laid bare the shortcomings of relying on privatised knowledge systems for medical research and development. When linked to private interests and profit-mechanisms, the system of medical knowledge innovation and research can be detrimental to people's lives and communities in most parts of the world and also undermine the enjoyment of the right to health.   

Within the broader public services movement, key milestones have included the first global “Future is Public” conference held in Amsterdam 2019, which brought together over 400 participants to discuss strategies for putting the “public” back into public services and to build democratic public ownership of the economy. A further milestone was the October 2021 launch of the collective civil society Global Manifesto on Public Services, signed by over 195 organisations.  In this context, health activists and advocates also formed a Consortium against the Commercialisation of Healthcare based on the shared values of advancing the right to health for all and strengthening public financing, delivery and governance of healthcare.   

Convinced it is now time to further strengthen and solidify this global movement in support of strong public healthcare services, both within the arena of global health and reaching out across sectors to other constituencies and movements, such as food, environment, education, housing, and transport. We are all aware that, as stated in the 1978 Alma Ata Declaration and grounded in international human rights law, the right to health is closely intertwined with all other human rights and planetary rights. These two dimensions can no longer remain separated. To this end, civil society actors, trade unions, health activists and researchers met in Chile for this global conference and gathering, The Future is Public 2022, to participate in four days of sectoral and cross-sectoral convenings.