The World Health Organization Issues Report Critical of Free Market Health Care

Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) released the World Health Report 1999: Making a Difference. In the introduction, WHO's Director-General, Dr. Gro Brundtland states:

The world could end the first decade of the 21st century with notable accomplishments. Most of the world's poor people would not longer suffer today's burden of premature death and excessive disability, and poverty itself would thereby be much reduced. Healthy life expectancy would increase for all. Smoking and other risks to health would fade in significance. The financial burdens of medical needs would be fairly shared, leaving no household without access to care or exposed to economic ruin as a result of health expenditure. And health systems would respond with greater compassion, quality and efficiency to the increasingly diverse demands they face.

In addition, the report says the two major challenges confronting health systems in all countries are how to ensure efficiency and how to achieve - and maintain - universal coverage. It points out that many countries need to increase overall spending on health if they are to make even the most inexpensive and effective health measures available to the whole population. Dr. Brundtland believes that WHO cannot support market-oriented approaches that ration health services to those with the ability to pay, and states:

Not only do market-oriented approaches lead to intolerable inequity with respect to a fundamental human right, but growing bodies of theory and evidence indicate markets in health to be inefficient as well.

The report finds that in high-income regions, non-communicable diseases such as depression and heart disease and injuries are the leading causes of disability and premature death. Infectious diseases - including malaria, diarrhea, tuberculosis and AIDS - continue to plague the poor. WHO singles out malaria control and the prevention of tobacco-related diseases as areas needing "concerted global action." "If current trends continue, by the year 2030, tobacco will kill 10 million people a year - over 70% of them in developing countries, where information on tobacco-related disease is often the weakest," the authors conclude. The WHO will propose that ministers at the World Health Assembly agree to launch negotiations leading to a "framework convention on tobacco control," to be adopted by 2003.

American Nurses Association President Dr. Beverly Malone attended the most recent WHO Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland as a U.S. Advisor.