In the TTIP negotiations, some critics have gotten worked up about the potential impact on Britain's NHS (“We know that TTIP poses a real and serious threat to the NHS. The only way to neutralise that threat is for David Cameron to give a cast iron guarantee that he will exclude the NHS from the trade agreement”). In addition to this "defensive" interest, though, I was intrigued to discover that the NHS may also be an "offensive" interest for the UK. This is from the Economist:
WALK down Whitehall and it is not hard to imagine its imperial heyday. Stern, grey-stone ministries loom over the buses and taxis. The most majestic is the Foreign Office, completed in 1868 and designed as “a kind of national palace”. From this building one-fifth of the planet and one-quarter of its population was once governed.
Those days are long gone, but today Britain is establishing a new, looser, more mercurial sort of global administrative network. As new economic powers join the rich world, they want to have rich-world states: responsive, efficient, well-run Leviathans that care for people when they get ill, educate them and keep them safe. In building these machines, such countries are looking disproportionately to Britain.
Take health care. The National Health Service (NHS) has a strong international brand. Already Moorfields Eye Hospital in London has a branch in Dubai; Great Ormond Street, a children’s hospital, provides training in the United Arab Emirates. At a trade fair in Dubai in 2013 the British government launched Healthcare UK, a new body to help other NHS entities (and private firms) sell services overseas. Since then the value to Britain of foreign health-care contracts has risen from £556m ($816m) in 2013-14 to £3.6 billion in 2015-16.
And if the NHS is an "offensive" interest for the UK, it might a "defensive" interest for others. Concerns about competing with state owned enterprises are often directed at countries such as China or Viet Nam. Will these rules also be used to keep the NHS from "unfairly" competing in foreign markets?