Hillary Clinton and Trade Deals: That “Giant Sucking Sound”

Recap: Slovaks were fed up with the ever rising cost of health insurance, so in 2006, they elected a government that ran on a platform promising to limit the profits of the insurers and transition to single payer.

However, a previous government had- back in the 1990s, signed one of those (quite inappropriately named, we will see) "free trade agreements", which had the kinds of clauses which a lot of the others have too (in the US, going back to NAFTA and GATS) limiting what they could do. It created these new "rights" - under investor-state. If anything the country did adversely effected any multinational corporations business interests, the corporations "rights" came first!

If Slovaks wanted their freedom, they would now have to pay.

But, in what is now clearly a pattern, they didn't realize this so in 2006 they passed this health reform law, the first part of the law was to limit the profits of health insurers, the second part was to end commercial for profit and transition to single payer, nonprofit, but they didn't get that far, because a multinational, an insurer sued them for what countries should have a right to do, adjust to changing conditions! Then in a second case the insurer sued them for what appears to me to be what they consider to be a "taking" of their "property" They lost because the panel said they had to wait until Slovakia actually implemented the law

(Slovakia said they could no longer afford to since the first decision had taken their money) So the insurer actually won because the country's people's rights were frustrated.