Wednesday, December 11, 2013

To Strive for Truly Universal Health Care


Our aims are clear:

First, everyone should have access to affordable, quality health services. Our commitment is universal, but during the next 755 days until the MDG deadline in December 2015, we are putting a special focus on expanding access to vital services for poor women and children. We are helping the poorest countries scale up results-based financing programs that are already producing dramatic improvements in maternal and child health in countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.  

Second, no one should be forced into poverty, or be kept in poverty, to pay for the health care they need.  Every year an estimated 100 million people – that’s more than a quarter of a million people every day – face poverty as a result of out-of-pocket health care costs.  So we must pay special attention to affordability for the poorest 40 percent of the population in every developing country.

No matter what else you may think of the World Bank, these remarks by World Bank president Jim Yong Kim delivered at the Government of Japan-World Bank Conference on Universal Health Coverage strike a refreshing note of basic human decency at a time when that sort of thing is becoming an increasingly rare commodity.

Everyone should have access to quality health services and no one should be forced into poverty or be kept in poverty to pay for it.  Whether it's a realistic goal, who can say?  What's important is that we can still aspire to such things.

5 comments:

Silverfox said...

The World Bank has no shortage of rope for any poor and impoverished nations to hang themselves with, Mound, and this is just another way for it to help a few more of them do just that, as far as I can see.

They may look like brave words but they always come with serious strings attached and it doesn't matter how big the loans or low the interest that fawning tool of the globalists is willing to put on the table, they know damn well that who they're offering it to will never be able to pay it back or off without eventully having no other option but to sell-off and privatise whatever national resources the globalists who put them up to it wanted all along and for as low a price as those nations will accept because they'll be desperate for the cash when the trap is finally sprung on them.

It's an old game, an old con, and a carefully thought out long range plan whose real motive isn't to help or encourage any real social progress or development but to actually thwart and prevent it by plunging any unwary nations so deeply in debt that they'll even have to cut back and reduce what few services and programs they once had no problems at all in delivering at the end of it.

Don't let the grey suits fool you, these are the bloodsuckers with piles of cash that make the poorest people in every society pay double or triple for what they can't afford in the first place through credit and mortgages that are easy to get into but not to get out of. It's always one step forward and two or three back by the end of it, if you're lucky. If not you can very easily lose more or all you once owned free and clear as well.

Nothing the banksters hate more than self-sufficient middle-class people who can pay their own way and nothing they try harder to do than to put as much pressure on them as they can to get a piece out of every paycheck they earn, too.

Face it, it's a system that rewards those who have more than they need at the very direct of expense of those who never had enough to begin with and ultimate burden of that has be shouldered by a middleclass whose own progress is always slowed and stymied by having to carry that weight and make-up for it.







Purple library guy said...

Gotta agree with Silver Fox. The World Bank and the IMF often talk a good game or put out sound reports talking about all the reasons they should do things very differently from how they actually do them. Then they apply the same old bloodsucking crap. The World Bank are the major reason why even after Mandela and the ANC beat apartheid, most of the blacks are still in poverty.

Anyong said...

If Canada does not know how to handle the Heath Care Crisis it needs to go to Japan and study how Japan is able to look after its population of 126,974,628 with a much higher rate of retired people than Canada, while its health care was patterned after Canadas, and why Japan is not having a financial problem regarding their health care. Or, spend time in the Scandinavian countries. The Canadian Government is just plain not wanting to fork out.

Anyong said...

That was an aside....the World Bank and the IMF are in cahoots with the wealthy. We have to keep the masses poor lest they rise up and threaten the wealthy...such a boo!

Anyong said...

They have to keep the masses ..that ought to be.