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Computer Model Reveals Escape Plan From Poverty's Vicious Circle
KentuckyFC writes "Infectious disease condemns poor countries to an endless cycle of ill health and poverty. Now a powerful new model of the link between disease and economic growth has revealed why some escape plans work while others just make matters worse. The problem is that when workers suffer from poor health, economic output goes down. And if economic output goes down, there is less to spend on healthcare. And if spending on healthcare drops, workers become less healthy. And so on. So an obvious solution is for a country to spend more on healthcare. But the new model says governments must take care since the cost to a poor country can send the economy spiraling into long term decline. By contrast, an injection of capital from outside the country allows spending on healthcare to increase without any drop in economic output. 'We find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap, but increasing health spending alone is not,' say the authors. And the amount required is relatively little. The model suggests that long-term investment needs only to be more than 15 per cent of the cost of healthcare. But anything less than this cannot prevent the vicious circle of decline."
Oh we're quite 'healthy' - not at the highest level but more than healthy enough to be able to weather serious disease as best as possible. TFA is talking about real malnutrition / lack of clean water / lack of vaccines level healthy.
Now, how we go about spending money on 'health' is another topic that we've attacked numerous times and is much more complex. But, barring small pockets of severe poverty, we're pretty healthy.
Going back to TFA
How much cash does a country need to escape a poverty trap? Goerg and co say their model suggests that the money should be equivalent to halving the cost of disease treatment and prevention.
But this level of investment is not needed in the long term. Goerg and co say the same outcome can be guaranteed if the long term investment is equivalent to only 15 per cent of this cost.
I wonder if they're talking about nutrition / basic sanitation in theses costs. While not terribly high dollar, it's often hard to get levels of basic nutrition and clean water to really poverty stricken places and create the infrastructure to keep the resources up over time. That might be more expensive. Still and all it gives groups like the IMF a spread sheet number that they can plug in to force countries to do something other than create a mega dam for the Chinese.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Very true. Talk to people in the healthcare field and they'll be able to list tons of examples of wasted money. Any patient on medicaid/medicare gets more treatments, pills, devices, etc. because the hospital, dr, or specialist can bill for it.
Example: 80-something comatose man in the final stages of lung cancer being given a colonoscopy ... just in case he might have ass cancer too. Seriously.
Healthcare is for-profit and must-CYA. Those are the two primary factors 90+% of the time. That's not to say there aren't doctors who care. Many do. But they're stuck working in a system that leaves them little choice but to go along if they want to continue practicing medicine (and paying off their insane student loans).
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
I live in Australia which has a hybrid UHC/Private system. Basically everyone pays for "medicare" (Which I guess would be called "medicaid" in the US) as a small addition to tax. Totally transparent, its just part of income tax and the contribution is income dependent. On top of that we have a private health system where you can get private health cover AS WELL which gives access to private hospitals (although in my experience the private hospitals are inferior to the excellent government ones, especially in emergency care). You have a choice here, but the govt system is largely excellent, however there might be waiting times to see specialists , sometimes in the months range for non essential stuff, and thats where private health cover is advisable. Fortunately private health insurance is well regulated and the doctor, not the health insurance companies , have final say in approving treatments.
Anyway, as you can imagine, when we have progressive governments, funding for the public system increases, and when you get conservative governments, that funding decreases.
But it backfires horribly to defund it, and ironically the actual costs increase.
I can giive an example. Under state labor, my local hospital had the 4 hour rule. In emergency, you would be seen within 15 minutes of ariving (or less if its urgent) , and within 4 hours either be seen by a doctor and sent home (maybe with medication or bandages or whatever) or admitted to hospital. In the case of borderline cases like Influensa, a patient would be sent to an Accute observation ward for overnight assessment. Its a great system that works brilliantly.
However in the last few years our state has had a conservative government that has systematically tried to defund the hospital. The end result is that waiting times have blown out to be multiple hours for non trauma cases in the emergency ward, and doctors are increasingly overworked and stressed out.
Last time I was admitted to emergency ward I was in with internal bleeding. Because I didn't *look* unhealthy it took 3 hours to see and diagnose me. This happened when I finally vomited blood and collapsed in the waiting room unconscious. I required surgery and a few weeks recovery. The doctor told me that if I had been diagnosed within half an hour of being admitted, it would have been a simple procedure and I would have been home within a day. As a result of underfunding, I cost the government *vastly more* in treatment costs then had I not. This is not a case of malpractice, the reality was the hospital was overworked and it took 3 hours to see me because thats how long it took to free up a doctor from all the other emergency cases.
It might seem paradoxical that properly funding universal healthcare is cheaper than not properly funding it, but it actually makes sense when you remember that prompt adequate treatment is almost always cheaper than trying to patch up some poor sod who's condition has been made worse by not treating it.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.