Health4Us
Together for better health
General Problem
The problem of low-income access to healthcare affects many parts of the world. The study suggests that the major problem in healthcare is accessibility, which has led countries to develop policies to solve the issue. Most of these policies aim to develop a financial protection. However, the problem still remains until these days because the root causes are more complex than what governments believe. Therefore, the understanding of the problem in greater detail is necessary to aid the global attempt in solving the problem. Nonetheless, other measures should be developed in order to reduce the gap between developing and developed countries to achieve global health care convergence. One common way to measure performance of healthcare systems is to look at life expectancy and infant mortality rate. According to these data, Africa and South East Asia are the 2 areas that must be improved.
Infant mortality under age 1, 2013
Source: Child Mortality Estimates
Source: CIA Factbook
Problems in Thailand
Analyzing in more specific problem in Thailand, there are many false strategies which result problem of low-income access to healthcare. In comparison of HDI expenditure on health, the result indicates that Thailand spends 4.6% of total GDP to health care as follows.
Source: The World Bank
This shows a large gap to U.S. and Japan that are at 17.1% and 10.3% respectively. Thailand figure is even less than South Africa. Nonetheless, Thailand has health expenditure per capita around the same as those in ASEAN. The percentage of health expenditure compared to GDP is around 3-6% for Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Furthermore, Thailand’s GDP per capita is at $387 billions, but the personal debt ratio is as high as 45.7 percent of total GDP. There are many problems preventing low income individuals to access healthcare. For instance, medical professionals tend to work for the public sector which results in the lack of doctors in rural area, and Thailand also lacks of medical services capacity to serve the patients as shown in the following table.
The table shows the number of doctors, nurses and dentists needed in Thailand per year with the prediction of demand incremental after the launch of free trade from AEC. The data shows that Thailand capacity of medical services is not enough in the government sector. Thailand could produces 2,500 doctors, 10,000 nurses and 800 dentists per year while the incremental of demand each year is around 12,000, 21,000 and 3,000 per year for doctor, nurses and dentist respectively. The scarcity tends to increase according to the incremental of the population while the numbers of medical capacity production only slightly add up every year. Thus, the problem of the lack of physicians per population tends to increase every year if this continues.
Reference:
According to the information, Thailand has the infant mortality under age 1 of 10-15. This figures is around the same as China and Vietnam, but below Malaysia who is around 5-10 only. The map of life expectancy shows that Thailand is around the world average at the life expectancy of early seventy. The number is also around the same among countries in ASEAN such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam who are around early seventy as well. These figures are tow of the factors that infer that Thailand is around the average in South East Asia in terms of healthcare accessibility and quality. Nevertheless, Thailand has many opportunities to become better. Thus, understanding the root causes of the problem and the complex system which creates the current situation would help us finding the right solutions.
Note: AEC is Asean Economic Community