Is Healthcare Suppose To Be Free Or a Luxury

Unless if you are a part of the 1% of billionaires and the 10% of ultra wealthy millionaires in Nigeria, falling sick can be a very big financial burden for you. I called a friend this morning and I was told he was not feeling too well. I requested that he go to the hospital but from the way he was sounding, he prefers to self-medicate and if possibly treat the symptoms if he wouldn't treat the sickness itself than to go to a hospital where he would be told something he least expect and would be required to pay the money he doesn't have out of pocket.

He just like over 150 million Nigerians are in this boat. The last time I went to the hospital, I spent over 200,000 naira through out my visits including card collection, tests, consultation, and medications. 200,000 is a lot of money and that is some people's salary for one year, some for 6 months, and some for 3 months depending on the class you fall in and it is very touching. So from where I stand, I ask myself if healthcare is a right for people especially those who are from the developing part of the world or is it a Luxury?

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Image From freemalaysiatoday

I was having a discussion with a woman and she mentioned a few health insurance policies that are available but non of this insurance policies were free and majority of the public health policies looked like the government is just subsidizing fees for illnesses that are cheap to treat but then not everyone has access to them. Its not like there aren't good hospitals in the country, there are and these hospitals do a great job at saving lives, I am talking about both teaching hospitals and private specialist hospitals but they all run on one blood to keep the hospital alive and save the patient’s life and that’s money.

In reality, I have visited a lot of health centers, hospitals, clinic, and whatsoever name the medical practitioners decide to call them and I have seen one thing that is common to them all, healthcare is a luxury because there is no way that any government can pay for high quality healthcare for all of its citizens and in places where the government try their best, they fall back to rationing and with this, some people get the care and some do not get the care.

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If we are expecting healthcare to be free, then what we will get are health care systems that are mediocre and people would have to wait a long list. So we now know that we have to stay with the two type of health system which is the private and the public. We need to learn to understand that with the public public system where tax payers money is used to treat patients, it would not be as efficient as with private healthcare systems because it is a business.

At the end of the day, there is no such thing as free healthcare instead the question should be who is paying for healthcare? It is either paid by the individual, or by the government through other people's taxes. With the word free health care, it means that some people's money would be used to save the life of another person they do not know even when the persons paying the tax are paying for their healthcare out of pocket.

You Can Study More

^{https://www.who.int/health-topics/universal-health-coverage
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets
https://www.afro.who.int/news/uhc-day-high-health
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9056140/}

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