Perhaps this has been talked about before but I am curious what it would entail, financially and legally to get health cover extended to every person on earth. My interest in the topic arises from a conversation I had with a Colombian friend of mine. We were talking about poverty, relative poverty and material goods in relation to contentment. We both came to the conclusion that providing healthcare to everyone, regardless of economic circumstances would vastly improve the average human quality of life. So what do ye think?
I’m not really interested in whether people think it would be a good idea or not, rather what would be the logistic problems and would such a system even be possible soon or in the next 20 years say. If it wouldn’t be possible in this timescale, when do you think it would be? Are there extant NGOs with this goal in mind?
What are the goals of this project? I could see a significant increase in lifespan with fairly simple clinics, drug supply, and sanitation improvement everywhere. This wouldn’t get the Third World up to First World standards, but would be a big improvement for a relatively low cost. Would this be acceptable?
One thing to consider would be distance. There are plenty of remote places that it simply makes no sense to build, stock, and man a medical outpost. Beyond the financial cost, one would also have to guard it against travelers, hunters, thieves, and whoever else mught come by and decide to help themselves to some supplies.
One trouble I see is a lot of humanity lives in rural, primitive areas. If an area has no electricity, roads, or running water you can’t put a hospital there. Even if you did, you can’t get highly trained medical personnel to live in the sticks. The result of that is you’d have to take the sick to where the hospitals are, sometimes trips of thousands of miles. Who pays for the helicopter rides?
We need to get the world at American middle class prosperity level before we can give them European middle class health care.
Lots of discussions of topics such as this conflate “health care” and “health insurance,” and taking the topic on a global scale really brings the distinction into sharp focus. So, do you want to make sure everyone has access to a doctor or do you just want a services to be paid for if someone manages to drag their ass to a doctor?
With the statement worded like that, I can’t see how anybody would disagree with it.
Maybe I misunderstood your insight?
Technological breakthroughs, money, training, behaviorial habits are roadblocks. Maybe all solutions will come together in 100 years for global health care coverage. But not 20.
I suppose realistically some compromise level would have to be agreed upon. How about Cuban-level medical care for everyone on earth, how much would that cost?
You also point out something I hadn’t considered, that properly-implemented sanitation would be extremely beneficial to health levels throughout the world.
I don’t think there is any question that it would improve the average quality of life. Giving everyone access to food and clean water would do much the same thing. Same goes for giving everyone access to law and justice.
The fly in the ointment is actually figuring out some way to DO it.
‘Never’ springs to mind. Not unless one of several things changes. One: radically expand our resource base in some way (space mining or some such). Two: Lots of people die off and the over all population decreases radically while not losing over all cohesion (i.e. we don’t degenerate into a Mad Max world). Three: We radically lower the standards of living for most of the industrialized world to free up the resources to improve those of the non-industrialized world. Three (A): At the same time we launch a military program designed to crush ever corrupt government or band of warlords out there and FORCE prosperity on their peoples. (there are a bunch more things under ‘A’ but I don’t want to get into that on my iPod atm).
I’m sure there are, at least to improve the average standards of living in some of the more distasteful 3rd world hell holes. I doubt anyone realistically thinks we could provide some kind of universal health care across the entire world though.
The insight was that regardless of my material level of wealth, ie I’m an Afghan yak herder living in a tent or I’m an NYC high powered lawyer, that access to “free” decent level medical care would be hugely beneficial to my lifestyle. I know it’s not a particularly startling insight.
Free access to a doctor and where needed, hospital/clinic treatment.
**Lobohan **and Acid Lamp, the point of distance is an interesting one. Any idea of the number of people who live in these remotest of remote places?
I’m curious, if I lived in wildest Alaska and have the best health insurance money can buy what medical care can I expect? None? Limited?
The problem is that making anything “free” doesn’t make it free, it simply pushes the costs elsewhere, and makes it impossible to adequately judge real need. It also dampens demand for more serious healthcare, which has significant long-term implications.
Your level of care would depend upon your ability to contact help, and the ability for you to be moved to a more complex facility. A serious injury that precluded you being transported would pretty much make your gold plated plan worthless.
I hear a lot about “quality of life,” and I just don’t see it. You take a third-world population and build a nice new clinic for them, fully-staffed and supplied . . . and you still have a third-world population, but with medical care. Sure, you’re increasing the average lifespan, but other than that, the people are still living in mud huts and subsisting by manual labor. Having a healthier body will certainly free some people to lead more productive lives, but that’s only a small part of the problem. I think universal secular education would have more far-reaching benefits than universal healthcare.
I’ve no experience of it but I imagine even subsistence living becomes more pleasant when your offspring don’t die as early, go blind or are crippled as often and you know that if you’re ever seriously ill that treatment will be forthcoming. A fair point on other developmental goals though.
Almost every serious development aid organisation I can think of - from UNICEF and WHO to PLAN to our own ones, like Brot für die Welt, misereor, Terre des Hommes etc. - plan long-term, which includes improving health.
To overcome the problem of rural transportation, they build one hospital in the center, and health outposts around it, and then train community Health volunteers (or similar) for each village. The village workers train each villager in the importance of hygiene, safe water, shit disposal and so on, which improves both quality of life and sickness. Pregnant mothers go to the next Health post for checkups and get classes on nursing and malnutrition (or rather how to avoid it), or what to do in case of diarrhea (the WHO developed a simple at -home recipe for oral rehydration simply the right mixture of cooked water, salt and sugar, that keeps babies from dying.)
They also educate women on preventing pregnancy once they have enough children. This is helped (as we know from European history) both that educated women feel more self-secure to demand proper family planning, and that if no longer every thrid child dies, and the safety nets are avaialable, the large families start to shrink. So instead of 8 children, who all are inadequately fed, and 3 of whom will die during childhood, while 2 others will be stunted due to malnutrition, the family will have only 4 children, but can afford to feed them well and know that they will be cared for and get less easily sick.
The advantage for the population is that malnutrition and diseases during the first 5 years stunt a person’s physical and mental development for the rest of their life. This is why the Allied countries helped Germany and the other European countries after WWII with food delieveries, because otherwise a whole generation would have been unable to work properly.
Also, it’s not a quesiton of education vs. Health provision, it’s a quesiton of education for children + education on effective organic farming for men + training on independent income generation for women + Health services + well building+ waste disposal (by creating bio gas to burn for light) + … = a well-off self-sufficient village where people live better than before.
They don’t mind living in a mud hut as much as you would do as long as all the other problems that daily beset them are solved!