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"Spending more on health care sounds like it should improve health, but our study suggests that is not the case and social spending could be used to improve the health of everyone," says Dr. Daniel Dutton, The School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta. "Relative to health care, we spend little on social services per person, so redistributing money to social services from health care is actually a small change in health care spending."
Health care costs are expanding in many developed countries like Canada, and governments are seeking ways to contain costs while maintaining a healthy population. Treating the social determinants of health like income, education, or social and physical living environments through spending on social services can help address the root causes of disease and poor health. However, health spending continues to make up the lion's share of spending.
[...] The commentary author suggests governments should allocate social spending fairly for both young and old to ensure that the younger generation is not being shortchanged.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180122104016.htm
[Related]: The need for health in all policies in Canada
(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:18PM
> But one goal could be to try to reduce the wealth divide.
Which wealth divide?
The one where the richest 5% of the world complain about the richest 0.00001% having too much, or the one where the richest 5% use a quarter of the resources and 80% of the world lives on less than $10 per day? Reducing the former doesn't help most of the world, reducing the latter would make almost everyone in the developed world pretty _un_happy.
Or maybe you want to address the wealth divide organisations like Oxfam tend to refer to - using net asset value, which makes out that the poorest people in the world are recent ivy league law and medical graduates (a very flawed measure, see e.g. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding-up-the-wealth-of-the-poor/ [reuters.com] )
Maybe you could just address absolute poverty - say take half the wealth off the top 10 richest and use it to eliminate world extreme poverty, except it wouldn't take that much any more (you'd need half roughly the wealth of the top 10 today if it was 1980ish, but now you'd only need about a fifth, why? - because the amount of absolute poverty has been declining fast anyway, even as the world's rich have got richer - see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-Poverty-Since-1820.png [ourworldindata.org]
Maybe it is all a matter of perception of poverty (from https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty [ourworldindata.org] ):
- in other words those in rich countries believe poverty has increased, those in poor countries believe the opposite, so are things actually getting better or worse? Kind of important to know that before changing what we are doing...