title: Market commodities and poor relief: the world bank proposal for health.
abstract: Investing in Health is the World Bank's blueprint for a new health policy within the context of structural adjustment. While this document includes a broad range of arguments, its implicit premises are neoliberal as can be deduced from its "agenda for action." Health is defined as a private responsibility and health care as a private good. This leads to a health policy based on two complementary principles: the reduction of state intervention and public responsibility, and the promotion of diversity and competition (i.e., privatization). Thus, public institutions should provide only a limited number of public goods and narrowly defined, cost-efficient forms of relief for the poor. All other health-related activities are considered private duties, to be resolved by the market, NGOs, or families. The World Bank policy provides a pragmatic contribution to efforts to achieve fiscal balance. However, it also pushes to recommodify health care and to turn health into a terrain for capital accumulation through the selective privatization of health-related financial and "discretionary" services. The proposal implies large-scale experimentation and dismantling of public institutions which are the only alternative now accessible to the majority. It rejects health as a human need and a social right, and violates basic values by claiming that life and death decisions can be justly made by the market or through a cost-effectiveness formula.
authors.forename: A C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Laurell
authors.forename: O L
authors.initials: OL
authors.lastname: Arellano
mesh_terms: D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D004465:Economic Competition; D006291:Health Policy / Q000191:economics*; D006801:Humans; D038622:Internationality; D008489:Medical Indigency / Q000191:economics*; D011056:Political Systems; D011203:Poverty; D011332:Privatization; D017150:Public Sector; D040841:Resource Allocation; D012935:Social Justice; D014480:United Nations