Saddam Hussein, an example for health care reform

by philg

Over breakfast at a favorite little French cafe in Harvard Square today a friend who is getting a master’s in Public Health at Harvard mentioned that under Saddam Hussein Iraq’s entire health care system had a budget of $18 million and that under U.S. occupation this has subsequently grown to $1.8 billion.  How well did Saddam do with his $18 mil?  http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html shows Iraqi life expectancy at birth to be 68 years versus the U.S.’s 77 years. Those extra 9 years are nice, of course, but they come at a cost of about $1.9 trillion per year or 100,000 times Saddam’s budget.

8 thoughts on “Saddam Hussein, an example for health care reform”

  1. Saddam was a primitive ruler of a primitive country. It probably didn’t occur to him to treat his water supplies with fluoride, and then make the people buy filters to remove it from their drinking water – or spend the money on researching and treating the adverse effects of its’ continuous intake. He didn’t have the bold vision to embark on a mass immunization program, so he didn’t have to face all the unforeseen side effects later. He didn’t care to require mandatory milk pasteurization, so his people had little chance to become lactose-intolerant. He wasn’t particularly inclined to force a poor implementation of poorly designed food pyramid down the throats of his schoolchildren, so he didn’t have to treat roughly 1/3 of them from obesity. He couldn’t even conceive the idea of giving some foodstapms to poorly educated folks to spend on junk foods at the supermarkets. And in his country, which is still stuck in the Middle Ages, it probably wouldn’t fly to suggest to replace mother’s milk with Gerber’s formula – even if it were recommended by the surgeon general office of that ruthless dictator.
    So in short, asking this question is much like wondering why Windows Server Advanced 2003 still cannot quite achieve file I/O levels of NetWare 4.1 circa 1995 – who cares if Novell is all but dead, and the liberated Iraqis can look forward to an extra 9 years of enjoying the freedom, courtesy of American taxpayers? We’re generous enough to share our problems with anyone we choose to help.

  2. That’s such a travesty. There are so much more worthy things to spend money on – like Software Engineer’s salaries so that they can re-invent the wheel every few years in the latest coding paradigm or lawyer’s fees when litigation occurs over corporate acquistions. Yes, spending money on quality of life, health and well being is such a waste !

  3. And, of course, we wouldn’t expect a dictatorship to distort such numbers or a third-world bureaucracy having problems compiling them.

    I mean, they did have 8 years of brutal war with Iran, followed by a decade of sanctions. Hell, you eliminate that, and the Iraqi system looks even better!

    Where’s your skepticism, Phil?

  4. But what is the quality of life for those 68 vs. 77 years? Would a difference of a trillion dollars be worth it if it was a choice between living 68 years, the latter 20 of them in constant discomfort, or 77 years, the latter three doped up beyond all lucidity?

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