Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Biographies
- Notices
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Reviews
- Introduction: Overview and purpose
- Section 1 Paradigms of international policies
- Section 2 The failure of the aid paradigm: poor disease control in developing countries
- Section 3 Impact of international health policies on access to health in middle-income countries: some experiences from Latin America
- Section 4 Determinants and implications of new liberal health policies: the case of India, China and Lebanon
- Section 5 Principles for alternative, publicly oriented health care policies, planning, management and delivery
- Section 6 A public health, strategic toolkit to implement these alternatives
- Conclusions
- Glossary
- Index
- References
Section 2 - The failure of the aid paradigm: poor disease control in developing countries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Biographies
- Notices
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Reviews
- Introduction: Overview and purpose
- Section 1 Paradigms of international policies
- Section 2 The failure of the aid paradigm: poor disease control in developing countries
- Section 3 Impact of international health policies on access to health in middle-income countries: some experiences from Latin America
- Section 4 Determinants and implications of new liberal health policies: the case of India, China and Lebanon
- Section 5 Principles for alternative, publicly oriented health care policies, planning, management and delivery
- Section 6 A public health, strategic toolkit to implement these alternatives
- Conclusions
- Glossary
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction to Section 2
We have seen in Section 1 that international health and aid policy failed on its own paradigm – disease control in LMICs. This failure encompasses the conditions addressed by the MDGs and the so-called neglected diseases – with a few, minor successes in some places. The chronic degenerative diseases (cancers, cerebro- and cardiovascular diseases, diabetes) were not even tackled by these programmes.
In this section, we demonstrate why disease-specific programmes should be redesigned since their current format has yielded poor results, for example:
on the one hand, these programmes need to access a pool of patients in the services where they do deliver their specialized care (which is demonstrated in Section 2, Chapter 3);
on the other hand, they strain the delivery of polyvalent health care (Section 2, Chapter 4).
Within the prevailing international juridical and policy frame, the only conceptual solution to this inextricable situation would have been to privatize both polyvalent, curative health care and disease-specific interventions. But the initial results of contracting out these activities in domains as different as tuberculosis control (Section 2, Chapter 5) and maternal health (Unger et al., 2009) are nothing less than unpromising. We argue that disease prioritization and exclusion of polyvalent curative care from public services portfolio is not a policy that is tenable. Consequently, no company should be entitled to sue a government on the grounds, of GATS, Free Trade Agreement (in the Americas) or other such covenant for subsidizing its hospitals and first-line services.
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- International Health and Aid PoliciesThe Need for Alternatives, pp. 35 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010