Crisis threatens access to health and social services
According to leading economists, the current crises will hit the private sector heavily in 2010. Especially housholds in countries with poor social security networks will be affected heavily and are facing the danger of poverty. For healthcare systems this means an extra challenge additional to the burden of the demographic change. So the global economic crisis poses a massive threat to the stability of the public healhcare, the social systems and the general access to healthcare services.
“The crisis is a serious threat to the healthcare system, but the negative consequences are not inevitable,” says Armin Fidler, the World Bank´s chief advisor on health issues. “The problem could be efficiently countered with specific measures in the scope of various national economic stimulus programmes.” Experiences from earlier crises show that after reducing spendings on general healthcare, it takes a relatively long time before the system reaches the former standard again. “Those who allow the crises to reduce the standard of healthcare are getting into a long-term problem with potentially catastrophic results for the social situation”, Fidler says.
Fidler basically assesses as positive that substantial parts of the numerous national economic stimulus programmes are devoted to the healthcare sector. For example, the area of healthcare accounts for approximately 7.5 percent of the US economic stimulus package; in Germany it is ten percent of EUR 50bn. What is problematic is that most of the spending will only have an impact in the long term and does not help to safeguard the current healthcare situation. Thus, in the US the development of a modern health information system certainly makes sense in the long term and is also an impulse for the IT industry, but it fails to improve the healthcare situation today. The same is true for German economic stimulus package, whose healthcare component is largely allocated to the modernisation and building of hospitals. “This supports the labour market and may improve infrastructure in the long term, but it does nothing for the precarious healthcare situation during the crisis.”
Consequently Fidler demands that the portions of the economic stimulus programme devoted to healthcare focus primarily on safeguarding and improving the current situation of healthcare with health benefits. In the process, the health sector can even finance a significant part of such programmes on its own. “The crises should also be viewed as an opportunity to implement long overdue reforms and there is enough latitude in which cost cuts are possible without negative consequences for healthcare”.
01.10.2009
