How Come Funding For Global Health Care Leads to Poorer Health?

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/28-5

Wherever they fall on the scale of economic development, most countries generally provide some form of health care to the poor and sick. So what happens when that public responsibility winds up on the balance sheet of a foreign loan? A new economic analysis reveals that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the subprime lender to the Global South, may be indirectly draining resources for medical care in some of the poorest countries in the world.

The Oxford-based study reveals that poor countries receiving aid to boost health care have, in many cases, simply used the money as a substitute for their regular state spending–not to enhance their health-care system. The result is that IMF funds end up hindering, not helping a country’s development. Comparing health spending among dozens of countries, those that relied on IMF loans and those that did not, the researchers found that “borrowers’ spending on the health system grew at half the speed of non-IMF borrowers.”

This in turn could have serious consequences for progress on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Some of the key targets for those goals relate to disparities in health and nutrition, particularly in maternal and children’s health and HIV/AIDS.

The study helps illuminate a paradox playing out in many poor countries: No matter how much aid money is pumped in through international financial institutions, the beleaguered economies keep missing benchmarks for development and improving living conditions. The findings coincide with growing frustration over the ineffectiveness of conventional foreign aid, as well as rising grassroots opposition to the coercive, predatory conditions typically attached to IMF loans.

More at the link --