Medicare And the Market

Editor,

"Medicare And the Market" (Mike Leavitt, 1/11/07) illustrates clearly one specious pillar of the neoliberal free-market fundamentalist ideology: that consumers of privatized essential services are "free" to "choose" not to purchase them at the offered price, thus driving the price down.

Leavitt claims that "competition" and market forces will establish fair prescription drug prices, but a prescription drug consumer's health, or even her very life, depends on acquiring these drugs, and choosing not to buy them because they are too expensive is absurdly self-destructive.

Privatizing necessities like prescription drugs (or privatizing developing nations' resources and exporting the profit derived from exploiting them), then cynically espousing sophistic free-market rationalizations to justify the widespread financial misery and the redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich that results, amount to exactly why the American capitalist
class is hated by the vast majority of people everywhere in the world including in the United States.

FYI: The neoliberal agenda was implemented first by Augusto Pinochet after he overthrew Chile's elected government with American help on Sept. 11, 1973. (Source)

Pinochet's project consisted of: privatize public assets; open up natural resources to private and unregulated exploitation -- in many cases running roughshod over the claims of indigenous populations; privatize social security; facilitate direct foreign investment and freer transnational capital flows; guarantee the right of foreign companies to repatriate profits from their Chilean operations; favor export-led growth over import substitution; strictly regulate the labor market by forbidding strikes in certain sectors and restricting the right to unionize.