Since the insurance, known as health mutuals, rolled out, average life expectancy has risen to 52 from 48, despite a continuing AIDS epidemic, according to Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, permanent secretary of Rwanda’s Ministry of Health. Deaths in childbirth and from malaria are down sharply, she added.
Of course, many things that are routine in the United States, like M.R.I. scans and dialysis, are generally unavailable. Cancer, strokes and heart attacks are often death sentences. The whole country, with a population of 9.7 million, has one neurosurgeon and three cardiologists.
Er, a lifespan of 52? Heart attacks are often death sentences? Brushing aside those pesky little mortality rates, it's fantastic that the government can furnish basic health care for only $2 per year. Their system must run like a well-oiled machine. Let's see...
Still, even with rationing this strict, how can any nation offer so much for $2 a year?
The answer is: It can’t. Not without outside help.
Partners in Health, the Boston-based health charity, which runs two rural hospitals and a network of smaller clinics in Rwanda, said its own costs ran $28 per person per year in areas it serves. It estimated that the government’s no-frills care costs $10 to $20.
According to a study recently published in Tropical Medicine & International Health, total health expenditures in Rwanda come to about $307 million a year, and about 53 percent of that comes from foreign donors, the largest of which is the United States. One big donor is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which is experimenting with ways to support whole health systems instead of just treating the three diseases in its name. It pays the premiums for 800,000 Rwandans officially rated as “poorest of the poor.”
Oh. It's heavily subsidized. I guess that explains the $2 thing. Even still, there must be some profound lesson we can learn from the paradise that is modern-day Rwanda.
Still, Dr. Binagwaho said, Rwanda can offer the United States one lesson about health insurance: “Solidarity — you cannot feel happy as a society if you don’t organize yourself so that people won’t die of poverty.”
Solidarity, comrades! Read all about it!
Leave it to the NYT to paint such a rosy picture of living conditions in Rwanda. Crap on toast.
ReplyDelete:-L
Wow. I'd be dead already. Wow, but it's only $2.00!!!! And how many millions from good ol' Uncle Sugar?
ReplyDeleteWho will subsidize the U.S. health care plan so that American taxpayer won't?
Sad thing is is this will be us in a couple years...so don't make too much fun of 'em :-(
ReplyDeletelol, Crap on toast? Think I'll pass.
ReplyDelete:-)
Repeal coming in November, hopefully.
It will be florrie.
ReplyDeleteCan't wait for the entertainment tonight though.
"I take full responsibility....but it's not my fault."
Rwanda's health care personnel either left the country or were butchered in the genocide; few returned. It has very few resources in the way of training new personnel. A friend who is a midwife and her EMT husband (and 4 kids) moved there last fall to do training so there can be people with a little knowledge to do basic care in rural areas.
ReplyDeleteAre they funded by Rwanda? Of course not! It's a mission agency, supported by Canadians. I don't begrudge that; we've supported them. But to say that improvements in Rwanda are because of $2 medical care is totally disingenuous.
Disingenuous is exactly the right word, Lyana.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great sacrifice your friends and their family made, Lyana - and Canada for funding it.
ReplyDeleteI don't think we ought look to Rwanda as a paradigm for health care. Sheesh. I mean, are the people that wrote the article on crack?
Disingenuous and irrelevant.
ReplyDelete