What Matters: your Focus is Vital

[Abu-Salman]

Having long alluded to generic drugs (same active principle but no brand label) and other solutions that dramatically lower healthcare cost (less reliance on machines, more centred on prevention, nurses and other less expensive clinicians etc), many not interested or informed about healthcare could now realise that there is tremendous scope in optimising such systems without quality loss.

 

However, health as a right needs everyone of us and can only be made a national priority through collective focus, with leaders similarly focused: the Cuban internationally celebrated success is a case in point, with Fidel influenced by his mentor Che, the most well-known doctor and revolutionary (Cuba now train doctors for much bigger, richer countries while sending experts and drugs worldwide).

 

Many innovations come from India too through necessity (low-cost maternities through leasing buildings, very affordable cardiac surgery centres), though lobbies and other interests do some obstruction just like in the case of generic drugs: eg, cheap eye surgery on the model of Mac Do burgers or the Aravind Eye Care System (why not make routine surgery accesible if burgers and other trivialities could be optimised).

 

Thus, just like in education (focus on litteracy via Somali), the best answers are not necessarily chic or sophisticated but come through a a focus on the bottom line (litteracy, reading or curiosity culture, practical job skills) while avoiding to do everything for everyone, including what do not really help; eg, requirements of fluency in foreign langages, or general education for all students, including those not yet ready or extremely deprived, as in the case of Djibouti with its over-ambitious, costly education system that yet fails the economy.

Among the ironies are that foreign langages such as French or English are learnt through immersion and motivation (job training stage) not in classrooms; those willing and with the right immersion mediums (middle-class) would have learnt it anyway or afforded the private sector.

 

When the only goal becomes to rationally guarantee minimal rights to the masses, everything else fall in place with minimal cost: eg, the world leading education and healthcare in "poor" Cuba where the right to health is enshrined as constitutional right, or Kerala successes in India with even much less resources etc.

Again, this basic right requires very little: Telecoms taxes or cattle exports licensing would suffice even in Somalia, which is better off or comparable to many Indian States (eg, just mere clean water and hands would halve our shockingly sky high maternal mortality rates at birth).

 

All that is needed is you to drill such message almost like an obssesion into everyone and this starts with basic healthcare & prevention and the concomitant litteracy as an immediate right to be guaranteed, the criteria through which local actors must be judged.