Good health for its own sake

For too long, societies around the world have tended to see money that is spent on healthcare as simply a cost to be borne, while considering spending on innovation, infrastructure, or education to be investments. But if you don’t see health as an investment, then you do not consider the importance of health when formulating policy, particularly economic policy.Ally Brown points to the short term thinking caused by electoral cycles as one reason that UK governments have fallen into this trap (doi:10.1136/bmj.p1164).1 Michael Marmot says that politicians simply “don’t read the health literature” on the detrimental effects their policies are having on health, because the research is not written by economists (doi:10.1136/bmj.p1183).2The consequences of failing to invest sufficiently to protect and improve health are seen throughout this week’s issue of The BMJ. Progress in tackling ethnic inequities in maternal health in the UK remains woefully slow, and the risk of…
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