WikiLeaks is releasing another part of President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP).
The Healthcare Annex, according to WikiLeaks, “seeks to regulate state schemes for medicines and medical devices. It forces healthcare authorities to give big pharmaceutical companies more information about national decisions on public access to medicine, and grants corporations greater powers to challenge decisions they perceive as harmful to their interests.”
Dr. Deborah Gleeson, who gave professional review and analysis to WikiLeaks said, “The purported aim of the Annex is to facilitate ‘high-quality healthcare’ but the Annex does nothing to achieve this. It is clearly intended to cater to the interests of the pharmaceutical industry.” Gleeson added, “Nor does this do anything to promote ‘free trade.’”
“The inclusion of the Healthcare Transparency Annex in the TPP serves no useful public interest purpose. It sets a terrible precedent for using regional trade deals to tamper with other countries’ health systems and could circumscribe the options available to developing countries seeking to introduce pharmaceutical coverage programs in the future,” noted Gleeson.
For Americans, it means Congress wouldn’t be able to reform Medicare, reported WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks reports the document isn’t released until four years after the TPP is passed into law.
“The TPP is the world’s largest economic trade agreement that will, if it comes into force, encompass more than 40 percent of the world’s GDP. Despite the wide-ranging effects on the global population, the TPP and the two other mega-agreements that make up the “Great Treaty”, (the TiSA and the TTIP), which all together cover two-thirds of global GDP, are currently being negotiated in secrecy,” notes WikiLeaks.
The draft of the agreement isn’t even available to some of the negotiating countries’ governments.
However, WikiLeaks reported, “Hundreds of large corporations, however, have been given access to portions of the text, generating a powerful lobby to effect changes on behalf of these groups.”
WikiLeaks is offering a $100,000 reward to anyone who can provide the rest of the TPP. At this time, WikiLeaks has raised $62,000 of that reward money.