Over the last 25 years Brazil lost around half a million square kilometers of forest - around the same area that China gained. Since 1990, the growing demand for forest products and for agricultural land has contributed to an average annual loss of 50,000 square kilometers of forest globally - an area the size of Costa Rica. Read more in "Five forest figures for the International Day of Forests."
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very interesting read.. i think the ideal scenario would obviously be the case where every citizen has the best possible health outcome, is satisfied with health care provided, protected from financial risk by a system that is sensitive to his needs. Some have come close e.g. the United Kingdom. However, there will be trade-offs that sometimes are not only a reflection of the underlying socialist... versus individualistic themes, but gross limitations in resources available for health making it difficult for the public sector to play the preferred central and regulatory role. In the end therefore, I believe that in many cases, it comes down to the issue surrounding mobilization of resources, especially domestic, for health.
Read more Read lessResource limitations, not only financial but infrastructure, technological, and human, certainly contribute to the shaping of the structural parameters of a health system. But as shown by different country experiences across the world, those countries that have adopted effective policies and allocated required resources to offer universal social health insurance or access to health services, have... done so by establishing clear priorities around social inclusion considerations. The 1941 Beveridge Report that lead to the establishment of the UK's NHS that you mentioned in your comment, was structured around ways to address the "giants evils" in society: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. More recently, the Seguro Popular initiative in Mexico, that has expanded health insurance protection since 2003 to about 50 million beneficiaries, was designed around strong ethical considerations that paved the way for achieving political agreements and decisions at the highest level of government as well as to mobilize the required resources to operationalize it (see related article at the end of the blog by Frenk and Gomez-Dantes).
Read more Read lessVery interesting and timely viewpoint. I thought I would find some clues or leads about how the three options play out in different country contexts (sans politics) but the article abruptly ended. How economics can relate to ehtics and values would be interesting in the context of health, social justice, gender equality, etc. Thank you.
Thanks a lot for this post. We have already (empirically) demonstrated that there are social inequalities in health. Now, the question is: do we consider these differences unjust or unfair? In order to make that judgment, we do need an ethical framework, a set of broader goals, regardless available resources.
In my previous reply to the comment posted by Adanna (see above), I put forward the examples of the UK and more recently of the ethical framework that guided design of the Seguro Popular initiative in Mexico. More recently, this dilemma was vividly illustrated during the “back and forth” debate prior to the approval of the Affordable Care Act in the United States in 2009, concerning some of its key... “social goals” provisions such as the requirement for health insurance companies to offer policies to everyone irrespective of his or her health status, the mandate that requires everyone to purchase insurance to prevent healthy people from opting out, and the provision of subsidies to keep health insurance affordable for the poor.
Read more Read lessYour point is right on the mark. And it could be added that a clear definion of social goals would also help us determine if a health system is efficient or not as well. As argued by Prof. Reinhart, if “efficiency” means reaching a goal with the minimum expenditure of real resources,then we will be able to determine whether a health system is “efficient” by knowing the ethical goals the system is... to reach.
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