Healthcare on a personal note
I thought having a good health care was part of the human right. And by ‘good’, I mean I could afford to see doctors — -affordability — — and get treated in time — accessibility — — when I am sick. But the hardcore truth, that in some regions I lived, is that the healthcare is anything but human right.
On Affordability
The ultimate goal of the comparison is to illustrate which country falls behind the others service-wise. Healthcare is a universal issue, but the price of medications differ up to 200%. Whose hands are behind the scenes to determine the medical prices?
The purpose is aimed to predict how much healthcare budget should be spent on the emerging diseases like Covid to minimize the treatment expenses.
I made two simple assumptions and equations to quantify the health care affordability in the countries I lived:
- Medical treatment affordability = A Starbucks tall Latte price / total monthly medical treatment fee. A Starbucks tall Latte price represents each region’s living costs standards; the higher the index, the lower the price of total monthly medical treatment fee and hence the more affordable the medical treatment is.
- Medication affordability= A Starbucks tall Latte price/A package of 60 mg Dulextine with 28 tablets; the higher the index, the lower the price of Dulextine and hence the more affordable the medication is.
3. Comparison of medical treatment and medication affordability among countries is done via normalizing each country’s index with the maximal medical affordability index; i.e., dividing each country’s index by Taiwan’s index.
4. Daily Covid cases and affordability for medication treatment is negatively correlated; the more accessible, affordable the medical treatment is, the more willing the citizens are to go to doctors and hence less Covid cases;
Below are the raw data from my first-hand experiences : the data of medication prices are from the local pharmacies in each country; the Starbucks tall Latte prices are cited from this website;
- The higher the ratio of living costs to medication costs, the more accessible medications are to residents.
- Medication affordability is different from medical treatment affordability; I could afford medications (60CHF) in Switzerland, but I couldn’t afford health insurance plus medical treatment in total per month(880CHF). So in any case, the price of medications in Switzerland doesn’t make a difference to me because I couldn’t even afford to go to doctors and hence couldn’t be prescribed. So the priority for healthcare improvement should go to medical treatment first — — then at least we know if there’s something wrong with our health.
Graph 2 tells the proportion of the medication prices compared to living costs(which is indicated by a Starbucks tall Latte price): — -i.e., while Starbucks Latte in Switzerland is 1.8 times more expensive than in Spain, its medication is 1.15 more expensive than in Spain. Among the five countries, Spain being the least affordable with medications based on its living standards, and Switzerland being the least affordable with medical treatment.
And let’s see if Covid cases correlates to each country’s medical treatment affordability:
In my theoretical best case scenario, imagine now that the local residents get sick and needs to go to doctors, and all those who can afford to go to doctors are diagnosed with Covid. This means, the affordability is the Covid recovery rate. So the rest, those who couldn’t afford would supposedly be infected Covid. So the reasonable Covid cases in one months(after their recovery) should be Covid cases by now * (1-affordability).
On Accessibility
I assume the medical treatment accessibility has to do with the number of doctors. Let’s split out the waiting time experience first:
