I still remember the disdain on the face of a guest Professor as he stood behind the lectern in a conference session on Universal health coverage (UHC) that I was participating in at the health capital of the world-Geneva. He asked us the question “Have you ever seen where this thing works?”, washing the conference room with a flood of cold skepticism. He no doubt must have been disappointed by this somewhat idealist goal that we have set for ourselves globally but seems to fall through our hands like water through a basket. Will we ever attain “Health for all” or are we going to continue swirling around this beautiful but long overdue concept?
To a large extent, many industrialized nations have been able to attain UHC in varying proportions. Without taking you through the pain of naming countries, most of Europe has one form of health coverage or the other. Canada has a good health system working where the gears are grinding to keep all its citizen’s health in check unlike the form of health coverage that is found in most emerging economies like Nigeria and Ghana where the working class is insured and the rest of the citizens are left to their peril. This fuels health tourism from the global south up north; many times with late presentations at the physicians table because many people in these countries with poor universal health coverage see their hospitals as slaughter houses. Those who enter never return. A single physician or nurse gets blamed for this incompetence each time. One person is forced to carry every day, the burden of health failure as she sees her patients file into her office in droves without a means to cover their health bills.
It is the 21st century and all a doctor’s medical armamentarium no longer fits into a briefcase. To benefit from adequate care, most patients need the services of several specialists, equipment and other personnel to diagnose, treat and prevent diseases. Unlike in the past when a doctor shot his bullets in the dark, today, with the advances in areas such as precision medicine, biomedical engineering and Nano engineering, the dark curtains of ignorance are being torn apart by technology and pure human genius. This comes with a cost however; and while in the past, a bowl of warm soup and tea and a few gold coins will be enough to pay for a doctor’s visit to a sick person, in our time the cost of health care is outrageously high that in many countries, it is this cost that kills patients and not the incompetence of medical staff.
A government that does not provide universal health care only leads a sickly population on a swift journey to absolute peril.
To satisfy people who are flooded with gloom and doubt whenever Universal Health coverage is mentioned, we must push further than we have done so far globally and look for other ways to pay for health care through innovative thinking in insurance, cost aversion and disease prevention. Armed with these tools, I strongly believe that everyone can access health in a dignified fashion within appropriate time that permits them to live a fulfilling life which empowers them to contribute to the development of this planet-the birth place of our species until we soon become an inter-planetary species. I still wonder why Universal Health Coverage is not working. Do you wonder why not too?
