Is Neo Liberalism Dictating Priorities for Health?

Wednesday 29th October 2008 13:30 – 15:00

Di McIntyre, University of Cape Town, South Africa and Gavin Mooney, Curtin University, Perth, Australia

This workshop is intended as a free and frank conversation led by Di and Gavin on the impact of neo liberalism on health and health care. The two speakers will restrict themselves to fifteen to twenty minutes each to allow plenty of time for debate.

Gavin will open, looking at neo liberalism globally and show how over the last thirty years, this form of capitalism has come to dominate the global economy with serious implications for world health. Neo liberalism acts against health improvement by increasing inequality, encouraging private health care, perhaps slowing economic growth and increasing individualism. These trends have been exacerbated by the policies of the global institutions of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. Gavin will spell out the implications of all of this for priority setting in health and health care.

Di will raise some issues around priority setting from the African perspective, the overwhelming contextual factor for which is the HIV/AIDS epidemic. A key area of current debate relates to prioritisation of government budgets between the health and other sectors. On the one hand there is growing civil society advocacy around meeting the ‘Abuja commitment’ by African Heads of State in 2001 to devote 15% of government budgets to health services, while on the other, there is growing resistance by some Ministers of Finance to shifting money into social services at the expense of ‘growth sectors’. The considerable impact of donor funding, increasingly reverting to a ‘vertical program’ approach, on priority setting within the public health sector, will also be raised. Finally, the implications of growing commercialisation of health care financing and provision on achieving government priorities will be considered.

The debate will then be opened to the floor.