[Editorial] Discarding the People’s Health for FTA With USA
The government is very determined to sign a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States, but elsewhere there are deepening concerns. It is unclear how serious a hit areas weak in competitiveness like agriculture and services will take, and whether there will be “no giving up on what has to be maintained” during the negotiations, as the government claims.
It is disturbing to learn that it is not just the screen quota reduction that came as a result of U.S. conditions, but also the suspension of the work on revising the system for reevaluating pharmaceutical prices as determined for health insurance. You can see what the U.S. has its eyes on. The government has been pursuing a plan in which it would revise the program for reevaluating the cost of pharmaceutical products, and then to lower their evaluated cost when the average value goes down in seven developed nations. Far more pharmaceutical items could have fallen in price had the government gone ahead.
The reason the U.S. is trying to prevent that has to be seen as an attempt to have its pharmaceutical companies be able to sell products in Korea for more than they would otherwise. The U.S. allows its pharmaceutical companies unlimited patent monopolies. Dean Baker of the U.S. Center for Economic and Policy Research once noted that the FTA’s the U.S. has signed with other nations stipulate prices of pharmaceutical products close to what they are in the U.S., and that confirms what the motive is. Obviously the financial status of the country’s health insurance is going to go even worse and the cost of maintaining the people’s health is going to rise even more.
The cost of pharmaceutical products is just one example of what could happen. It hints at how other areas are not going to go as we’d like them, areas such as agriculture and services. Sometimes in negotiations you have to play bluff, and sometimes you have to push and pull. By the looks of it Korea is being dragged around even before the full negotiations begin, and it already looks like it is we who will be left with the lesser deal. Do the people have reason to believe the same low posturing is not going to continue at the main stage of the negotiations?
The Hankyoreh, 4 March 2006.
[Translations by Seoul Selection]