PHM-Exch> World Health Organisation announced the launch of its “first investment case”

[Claudio Schuftan]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 7:32 PM Leslie London <leslie.london at uct.ac.za>
wrote:


With lots of fanfare and hubris, the World Health Organisation announced
the launch of its “first investment case” that can “save up to 30 million
lives” at
http://www.who.int/news-room/detail/19-09-2018-who-launches-first-investment-case-to-save-up-to-30-million-lives
<https://protect-za.mimecast.com/s/MmRSCVm2BQCzXZOjIGPviw>.


With a straight face, the WHO seems to believe that it needs to justify, in
economic terms, the existence of a global governance structure for health.
The figure of “economic gains of US$ 240 billion” is touted as the return
on increasing the WHO’s budget by US$10 billion to reach its normative
budget of US$14 billion so as to convince the doubtful reader.


It is astonishing, but deeply revealing of how bad the global governance
situation is, that the WHO has to justify human life in monetary
(‘investment’) terms. Not that it will change Trump and others’ views
because their views are not based on evidence (dollars and sense) but on
ideology – which is to dismember any vestages of social solidarity or
collective decision-making at local and global level – and open the world
to the market at any opportunity – irrespective of whether it costs more in
financial or human terms.

WHO has been systematically underfunded as a result of a concerted
ideological onslaught by countries whose corporate entities and elite
classes stand to benefit from the capture of global governance by unelected
private actors.


No doubt, WHO has many serious problems but neoliberal solutions are
dangerous solutions to different problems, do not strengthen WHO governance
but weaken it.

That’s why WHO now has to go cap-in-hand, clutching a seemingly miraculous
investment case argument to beg for the budgets it has been starved of for
the past decade or more, payments which it should be entitled to expect
from member states. The WHO is going begging to the same powerful entities
who have made political choices to starve it of funding for years and would
like to see the illogic of the lean state applied to the WHO.


Who would have thought the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights would end up
in such an abysmal decline that one has to prove that health is worth
paying for?


 Leslie London
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