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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @02:32PM (1 child)
Actually, that false. Consider the flu; the chance a person gets the flu is statistically dependent on times they are exposed to the flu (this is usually even true if they have been vaccinated). The spread of a virus can achieve a critical threshold such that it can't be stopped from spreading to the entire population (in some ways this is very similar to critical mass in nuclear fission). Therefore, the effectiveness of a vaccine to prevent the incidence of the flu in a population crucially depends on what proportion of people in the population are vaccinated. The more people are vaccinated, the fewer exposures anyone is likely to get, the fewer times people will actually get sick.
A social service that makes flue vaccines available freely to everyone, even, for example, made available to students (with parental) consent would be a tremendous boon to society, and very effective use of tax dollars. Fewer hours sick, or taking care of the sick, means more economic productivity. More economic productivity means everyone is richer. Being richer, it turns out, means that life is less stressful and less unhealthy.
Everyone is so focused on the individual that they (sic) fail to see the forest for the trees.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:55PM
So is there a country that has substantially reduced the incidence of flu? And anyway, it sounds like you are advocating more health care spending (free flu shots), not less.