The final draft of Chile’s new Constitution presents some radical changes

Chile’s Constitutional Assembly presented its final draft to President Gabriel Boric this week, exactly two months ahead of the September 4 exit referendum that will determine whether the text is adopted as the country’s new Constitution.

The proposal is 388-articles-long, one of the largest in the world, though from its very start it shows a marked contrast to the current dictatorship-era text. Article 1 argues that Chile is a “social and democratic state,” as well as “plurinational, intercultural, regional and ecological.”

According to the Assembly, the definition of the country as a “social state” comes in opposition to the “subsidiary role of the state implicit in the current Constitution, which leaves it up to the private sector to satisfy social rights, exempting the state from the responsibility of granting them.”

That change alone opens the door to a significantly larger role for the state in the economy, as opposed to the 1980 text which granted some of the strongest private property rights of any magna carta on the planet.

Will Chile have a welfare state?

Such interventionism is evident in areas such as healthcare, where the state would take overall control of the system, aided by a government agency that would administer the mandatory contributions that workers currently make to public and private insurers.

This is a significant change in relation to the status quo, whereby the Fonasa public health insurance system works separately from private insurers, known as Isapres, which are not considered part of Chile’s national health service.

For-profit private healthcare would still be allowed under the constitutional arrangement, but in significantly diminished form, with experts arguing that Fonasa-like services would become the norm, as these would be the recipients of a greater share of funds.

As for education, the biggest change will be at tertiary level: public universities would...