Health care costs throw 100 million into poverty, World Bank says
Lack of health care providers or lack of money to pay for medicine results in 100 million people being reduced to poverty every year, the head of the World Bank said Tuesday.
In remarks to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said economic growth is not possible without universal health care.
"All countries must harness investments in other sectors beyond health that provide the essential foundations for a healthy society," he added.
"Achieving universal health coverage requires solutions beyond the health sector, including investments in people, like education and social protection, but also things like roads, water and sanitation, and information technology. For example, policy interventions to curb tobacco use or improve air quality, diet and road safety can all play a critical role in addressing the alarming increase in chronic conditions and injuries in so many emerging economies."
Devising programs to help people requires tremendous political will, Kim said, but efforts in many parts of the world are succeeding.
"What is the lesson for us here today, as we hear the same negative arguments about universal health care?" Kim asked. "We saw with AIDS that concrete action often only happens when there is a powerful political and social movement behind it.
"And just as the AIDS activists drove the movement for treatment — and brought along the scientists, policymakers, the donors and businesses — today around the world we are seeing a large, and growing, movement to achieve universal health coverage."
Good health and related improvements are an investment, Kim stressed.
"The new report of the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health estimates that about 24 percent of growth in 'full income' in developing countries from 2000-2011 resulted from health improvements," he said. "Full income is defined as the sum of the income growth measured in the national income accounts, plus the value of the change in mortality (or life expectancy), in that period.
"Projecting forward to 2035, the commission report says that better investments in health could yield a 9-to-20-fold return in full income."
How health care improvements come about will vary from country to country, he said.
"When Ethiopia launched its free universal primary care program in 2003, at its center was a network of health extension workers," Kim said. "These 35,000 women — 10th-grade high school graduates recruited from their communities —were trained for one year and redeployed back into their communities.
"The latest survey data show that child mortality fell by over one quarter, as did child stunting. For women, anemia rates fell and contraceptive use nearly doubled, helping to reduce the total fertility rate."
source: www.allvoices.com