Access to Healthcare
There are a number of root causes for the global issue of lack of health care. The big ones relate to the fact that the world is still building its health care capacity, starting from a point pre-industrialization of very few people having access. This problem is compounded by a rapidly-growing population that it many parts of the world makes it almost impossible to keep up with infrastructure even when the money is there. That said, two major issues that are constraining the ability to governments to increase access to health care. These issues are spending on health care and the number of physicians.
Access to Health Care highlights these two issues. Health care spending, the site notes, is subject to great disparity between the wealthy nations and the non-wealthy nations. Health care spending, they note, is 4500 times higher in the top 5% of the world's population (by wealth) than it is for the lowest 20%. Even with this spending, there is uneven access to health care. For example, the country that spends...
Governments lack the fiscal capacity to make massive investments in health care, and private entities often face a market that is unable to pay for private health care. The result is that many parts of the developing world have either high end hospitals for the wealthy and a smattering of woefully underfunded clinics for the rest of the populace.
This can also relate to political instability, where infrastructure is damaged. Also, it needs to be studied whether the cause of physician shortfall relates to lack of training supply or an issue of emigration, where the talented doctors are leaving the country for better opportunities elsewhere. The global shortage of physicians allows for opportunities for physicians to move, which creates problems in the countries that can…
