Join us to discuss: what are the impacts for patients and health systems when the World Bank funds private healthcare?

This Oxfam organised expert panel event will explore fundamental questions about the appropriateness of public funds mandated to fight poverty and achieve global development goals being used to finance for-profit private healthcare in the Global South. With the World Bank Group leading the charge to ‘crowd in’ private finance for health, including via greater investment in private equity funds, panellists will discuss: what is the impact of this approach on national health systems, healthcare inequality and patient rights? Who really benefits? And what can we learn from the increasing financialisation of health and social care from high income countries like the United States of America?

Panellists will include Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Gretchen Morgenson and author of ‘These are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs – and Wrecks – America’; National co-convenor of People’s Health Movement–India and Senior consultant for Indian civil society organisation SATHI Dr Abhay Shukla; Treasurer of the Kenya Medical Practitioners Pharmacists and Dentists Union (KMPDU) Dr Mercy Nabwire; Senior Industry Specialist at the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC) Raju Narayan; and Oxfam’s Global Health Lead Anna Marriott, author of Oxfam’s report on development financing and private healthcare, Sick Development.

The panel will be moderated by Global Economic Change Program Manager at Oxfam America and host of the Sick Development podcast, Maaza Seyoum.

When? June 6, 2024 3pm (EDT), arrival from 2.30pm

Where? In person at The City View Room, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University

Panelist and Moderator Bios:

Gretchen Morgenson is the senior financial reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit. A former stockbroker, she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her "trenchant and incisive" reporting on Wall Street. Her new prize-winning book These are the Plunders: How Private Equity Runs – and Wrecks – America was published in 2023.

Dr Abhay Shukla is a public health physician based in India where he works as national co-convenor of People’s Health Movement–India and a senior consultant for Indian civil society organisation SATHI. He has worked on public and community health since the last 35 years and played leading roles in implementing national and state level Community monitoring and planning of public health services, and processes for developing the national ‘Patients’ Rights Charter’. His research and advocacy areas include transnational investments in the Indian healthcare sector, corporatisation of healthcare, regulation of private healthcare sector, collaborative social accountability, and right to healthcare. He is a global Steering Committee member of COPASAH (Community of Practitioners on Accountability and Social Action in Health) international network.

Dr Mercy Nabwire is the Treasurer at the Kenya Medical Practitioners Pharmacists and Dentists Union (KMPDU) with 12 years' experience in Pharmacy. She is a dedicated and influential leader in the health sector, advocating for the rights and welfare of doctors and other health workers in Kenya, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. She has negotiated with the government and other stakeholders to address issues relating to staff welfare and rights.

Anna Marriott is Health Policy Manager for Oxfam and has led Oxfam's work campaigning for universal health care for 17 years. She has published several papers on health financing and health care delivery, most recently Sick Development: How rich-country government and World Bank funding to for-profit private hospitals causes harm, and why it should be stopped.

Maaza Seyoum is a global health expert and gender, economic & racial justice campaigner. She has worked on the social determinants of health for close to two decades and is now managing Oxfam America’s innovative work on Global Economic Change and alternatives to neoliberalism. She is particularly interested in addressing the impacts of coloniality and racism on access to health care and economic justice.

Raju Narayan is a Senior Industry Specialist at IFC with over 34 years of extensive management, operations, business development and hospital and specialty medical clinic design and development experience in the healthcare services sector. Raju comes with direct healthcare operations and management experience across multiple geographies, both in matured and emerging markets. Raju has acquired hands-on working experience in tertiary care hospital operations and specialty healthcare services in Singapore, India, Vietnam, Middle East and Australia.

Who is profiting from global health and what are the impacts for patients?