Express Healthcare: Change the Adage: Wealth Needs Health

Change the Adage: Wealth needs Health

Express Healthcare, Sagar Deoskar, 1 July 2020

(Image courtesy of Express Healthcare)

Academic research on the cost of pandemics on the global economy has been done by multiple credible institutions in past for more than a decade now. The importance of devising definitive policies to tackle the pandemics, the obligation on governments to find ways of financing a robust health system have been prescribed as often as your next-door uncle prescribing yoga to prevent all health maladies. Yet, as the ongoing pandemic has demonstrated, the world at large has turned a blind eye to this remedy, preferring to stock up on paracetamol for when the signs of fever would show rather than investing steadily and regularly for preparing a resilient health system. The USA for example since the 1990s has had a strategic national stockpile for emergency medical supplies which long before the arrival of Coronavirus as Washington Post had recently reported was underfunded and nearly depleted. 

Despite the relatively recent outbreaks in the long line of pandemics like that of SARS, MERS, Ebola the world has seen very little structural changes in terms of implementable policies. A part of the lethargy and inertia to bring about catalytic change in the health system can largely be attributed to the lack of urgency that it finds in the global narrative. Although an intrinsic part of the success and failings of economies based on traditional parameters like the GDP, PCI and PPP, a conversation on health metrics often happens delineated from conversations on economic reforms. Improvement in public healthcare is deemed to be a secondary function benefiting from the trickle-down effect of a well-functioning economy rather than being an equal partner in elevating the economic parameters. One prime reason for this has been that economic reforms which largely indicate changes in land, labour, market entry etc., have direct quantifiable metrics which can afford a country a favourable credit rating but effecting changes in the health system will always get masked.