Wealth is Health

By: Bikal Dhungel

This article does not explain the general importance of health rather how is health and wealth related to development. 'Health is Wealth' is a common expression that is well known these days but 'Wealth is Health' has been true as well.

Health is wealth because healthier people can work hard. Better health is also correlated with better performance in school or college. Healthy students perform better in average than unhealthy student who frequently miss the classes. As educational performance is related to wealth, those who are good in school also earn more money later in life. Healthier people are also more productive. The benefit of good health is obvious.

However, wealth is also health. With more money, one can afford better healthcare or better medicine. Wealthy people can afford better nutrition, they can eat healthy and balanced diet. Poor do not have this privilege. There are enough evidence of this. When we look at the life expectancy at birth, rich countries top the table. Japan and other industrialized countries have more than 80 whereas some least developed countries have a life expectancy of less than 45 years. It is because they have poor healthcare because they cannot afford, and they have poor diet. The situation in Europe before they became rich was not different. Life expectancy before 1700 was less than 40 in all over the world. Only in the last 200 years, it doubled. Due to more calory intake and better healthcare technologies, people live longer. For example, an average British had a daily calory intake of about 3000 per day in 1800. In 1980, it was 3700. When South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China etc became rich, their calory intake per day increased as well. In rich developed countries, data shows that, they have better health indicators. In poor countries however, it looks gloomy. They have a large disease burden, about 80% of total. Malnutrition is rampant and the number of stunted children are also high. Consequently, educational performance is also poor and this is the cause of lower level of economic development.

Public Health System is also better in rich countries. There is better management, one can see more focus on prevention rather than treatment. Prevention measures are cost-effective and they place lower burden on health system. This is quite opposite in poor countries. People are reluctant to spend on prevention measures but later end up paying a lot for costly treatment. Taking an example of Vaccines, poor people do not make use of this and often procrastinate. Once they are caught by diseases, they have no other option than to bear the cost of treatment. It takes a mere 30 cents per year to buy an amount of chlorine that is needed to purify water people drink for a year but most people either cannot afford or do not do it or the chlorine bleaches are simply not available, or they do not know it. In rich countries however, vaccinations are compulsory. You have no other option but to vaccinate and if you dont, schools do not take the admission of your children. But even if you dont vaccinate, you are less likely to be affected because everybody else are vaccinated. Regarding clean water, we in rich countries do not need to think about it because the water supply company does this for us. 

Rich people tend to buy healthy, organic food whereas the poor mostly eat junk foods when we see the case within developed countries. Coming back to the general argument that wealth is health, rich countries can also afford to do wide research in medical sector. We have made a gigantic progress in terms of health technologies. There are so many technologies available that even health professionals are not aware of this as the pace of technological progress is too fast. Moreover, all of the top ten pharmaceuticals in the world come from rich countries. They can afford to do researches. Normally, the data shows, to launch one medicine in the market, it takes 10-15 years in average for pharma companies and costs about a billion dollar. Developing countries cannot afford this. So they have to rely on generic drugs. Moreover, rich countries are also able to train costly health professionals like the doctors with quality education. Poor countries proportionally train fewer doctors, though this is changing since the emergence of china.

The point here is, when you are wealthy, you can afford many things in health sector. As a country, you can finance public health campaigns, you can afford better treatment, you can afford better technologies, better research and other things related to health. So, wealth is one most important cause of better health. Health is wealth and wealth is health.