medical science can see them, you're in bad shape.
These guys even go into the mistake of bailing
banks with money that's needed for health.
What they didn't note was Merkel blackmailing
Greece so that it can spend more on tanks, and
less on health. The Lancet can't do everything.
Checkit: New
scientist
Greek
austerity tragedy shows where not to make cuts
16:23 26 February 2014 by Andy Coghlan
Austerity
can be bad for your health. Greece has seen drastic increases in infant
mortality, suicide and depression since the government made deep cuts to
healthcare and social support services between 2009 and 2012. These fallouts
may soon be reprised in other countries that have embarked on tough austerity
measures, such as Spain and Portugal.
Following
the country's financial crash, Greece cut its hospital budget by 25 per cent
cut and slashed funding for mental health problems by 55 per cent. An analysis
of health statistics shows that as a result, suicides increased 45 per cent
between 2007 and 2011 and, over roughly the same period, cases of depression
more than doubled and infant mortality rose by 43 per cent.
Needle-exchange
schemes and free condoms for injecting drug users were also cut. By 2012, new
HIV cases in this group were 32 times what they had been in 2009.
The
country has also had its first cases of locally spread malaria for 40 years.
"The
Greek experience shows the serious consequences of withdrawing health spending
and social services," says David Stuckler of the University of Oxford,
lead author of the analysis.
Spain
next?
The
worry is that a similar pattern will be seen in Spain, which introduced
similarly savage cuts to health budgets in 2012 and 2013. "We think Spain
will follow if the cuts are not reversed," says Helena Legido-Quigley of
the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who last year published a
study on how the recession has so far affected health in Spain.
Legido-Quigley
says that more recent developments such as the withdrawal of universal access
to healthcare from 873,000 non-residents in 2012 could create conditions for
epidemics of HIV and TB like those seen when services were withdrawn in Greece.
She says there's still time to prevent similar epidemics in Spain, but only by
restoring universal healthcare.
False
economy
Stuckler
says preventing epidemics is far cheaper than controlling them once they've
begun. Last year, he produced estimates suggesting that healthcare spending
actually boosts the economy, adding more than $4 to the economy for every $1
invested, compared with a drain on the economy of $10 for every $1 invested in
defence, for example.
It's
a false economy to cut spending on health and welfare, says Stuckler, and both
Iceland and Finland survived economic meltdowns without doing so. Instead, they
saved public money by not bailing out failed banks, leaving the private sector
to pick up the bill.
"Short-term
savings gained by drastic austerity measures should be weighed against their
long-term costs," says George Slavich of the University of California, Los
Angeles, who investigates the long-term effects of stress. "Living in a
state of social and economic unpredictability, with inadequate access to
healthcare, does not just contribute to short-term illness, it can also set in
motion a set of biological processes that greatly affect lifelong health, and
which can even lead to premature death," he says.
Journal
reference: The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(13)62291-6
