'Recessions can hurt, but austerity kills'
'Recessions can hurt, but austerity kills'
In the US, more than five million people have lost access to health care. In Greece, there's a 200% increase in HIV cases. And in some of the worst-hit countries, suicide rates are up. David Stuckler, author of an explosive new book, says the facts speak for themselves
Jon Henley
The Guardian, Wednesday 15 May 2013 12.40 EDT
The austerity programmes administered by western governments in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis were, of course, intended as a remedy, a tough but necessary course of treatment to relieve the symptoms of debts and deficits and to cure recession. But if, David Stuckler says, austerity had been run like a clinical trial, "It would have been discontinued. The evidence of its deadly side-effects – of the profound effects of economic choices on health – is overwhelming."
Stuckler speaks softly, in the measured tones and carefully weighed terms of the academic, which is what he is: a leading expert on the economics of health, masters in public health degree from Yale, PhD from Cambridge, senior research leader at Oxford, 100-odd peer-reviewed papers to his name. But his message – especially here, as even the IMF starts to question chancellor George Osborne's enthusiasm for ever-deeper budget cuts – is explosive, backed by a decade of research, and based on reams of publicly available data: "Recessions," Stuckler says bluntly, "can hurt. But austerity kills."
In a powerful new book, The Body Economic, Stuckler and his colleague Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiologist at Stanford University, show that austerity is now having a "devastating effect" on public health in Europe and North America.
The mass of data they have mined reveals that more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression have been recorded across the two continents since governments started introducing austerity programmes in the aftermath of the crisis.
More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/may/15/recessions-hurt-but-austerity-kills