142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

Annual Meeting Recordings are now available for purchase

301213
Obamacare: The Neoliberal Model Comes Home to Roost in the United States - If We Let It

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Monday, November 17, 2014 : 12:50 PM - 1:10 PM

Howard Waitzkin, MD, PhD , Department of Sociology and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
A dynamic, young, newly elected president makes health reform one of his highest priorities. His proposal aims to improve access for the uninsured and underinsured. To achieve that goal, he decides to collaborate with the private, for-profit insurance industry. Public hospitals and other public-sector institutions would compete with the private insurance sector for public, tax-generated revenues.
    The president in this case was César Gaviria Trujillo, President of Colombia, from 1990 to 1994. During 1994, health reform was enacted in Colombia by Law 100. The reform was mandated and partly financed by loans from the World Bank. Gaviria and colleagues presented the reform to financial elites at the World Economic Forum and elsewhere. The Colombian health reform became a model for health reform around the world and more recently in the United States.
    The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) follows the neoliberal pattern favored by international financial institutions and multinational insurance corporations throughout the world. The ACA aims to enhance access by corporations to public sector health and social security/Medicare trust funds. An ideology favoring for-profit corporations in the marketplace justifies these reforms through unproven claims about the efficiency of the private sector and enhanced quality of care under principles of competition and business management. The ACA continues to deal with health care as a commodity to be bought and sold in a competitive marketplace, rather than as a fundamental human right to be guaranteed by government according to principles of social solidarity.

Learning Areas:

Advocacy for health and health education
Provision of health care to the public
Public health or related laws, regulations, standards, or guidelines
Public health or related public policy

Learning Objectives:
Explain the intellectual and historical origins of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Analyze the overlap between the ACA and historical proposals of the World Bank in other countries, such as Colombia. Describe the relationships among the ACA, international financial institutions, and multinational insurance corporations. Identify the ideological underpinnings of the ACA.

Keyword(s): Policy/Policy Development, Affordable Care Act

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I researched the topic and wrote the abstract.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.