World Health Care Trends – Why income doesn’t matter

The opening session for the World Health Care Congress featured Hans Rosling MD PhD of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute – a wizard in the use of statistics to explain the relationship between income, health status and the evolution thereof in ways that enable regular people to quickly and readily grasp the issues.
According to Rosling, the biggest disconnect between reality and our current perceptions there of is our segmentation of countries into ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, a segmentation that we use (that ‘we’ would include me) that now looks to really miss the mark – and not by a little.
There is no difference between the Western and developing worlds in two key areas – fertility rate and life expectancy at birth – this has been a remarkable change over the last 50 years, due to fewer kids, better sanitation and nutrition. Pretty simple stuff. But big in terms of implications – for example, demographically, Vietnam is precisely where the US was in 1980 – in terms of family size and life expectancy. And these changes happened before significant economic changes in Vietnam, changes that one would normally associate with dramatically improved population health status.
Most economic growth in the world is taking place in developing countries, the countries that make up 60% of world population and earn a quarter of total income. Yes, we still have about a billion poor people, but that number has remained static for over a hundred years – the percentage of the population that is poor has dropped dramatically.
Rosling’s presentation also made a very convincing case, or more accurately proved, his point that there are wide disparities between and among countries in the same areas – making general statements about OECD v Developing countries is not only dead wrong, it is misleading. Misleading in that we draw conclusions based on a split that appears to be deep and persistent, when in fact the ‘developing’ world is growing faster, economically and in terms of health status, and is rapidly catching up to the developed world.
What does this mean for you?
Always question your assumptions.