Health professionals last month revealed the news that UK life expectancy in 2015 to 2017 had remained virtually unchanged on the previous three years – the first time this had happened since the early 1980s. Given that the early 1980s was also a time of deep economic recession, there has inevitably been speculation that austerity is to blame for the stalling of life expectancy. NHS Health spending has been flat in real terms since 2010, once a rising population is taken into account.
An article in the Lancet by researchers from the University of Washington has analysed the impact of austerity on life expectancy in Greece. Under Greece’s bailout, health spending fell from 9.8% of GDP in 2008 to 8.1% in 2014, a time when national output was contracting rapidly. The country’s death rate had risen by about 5.6% in the decade running up to the first bailout in 2010 but then jumped by 17.6% in the six years that followed. The rate rose three times faster than the rate in Western Europe overall.
The Lancet article notes: “Many of the causes of death that increased in Greece are potentially responsive to care, including HIV, neoplasms, cirrhosis, neurological disorders, chronic kidney disease, and most types of cardiovascular disease. Improvements in child mortality in Greece have also stagnated since 2000, with increases in deaths due to neonatal haemolytic disease and neonatal sepsis since 2010, both of which might also reflect reduced health system performance.”
The Lancet article says the rise in mortality is not solely down to demographics because there have been increases in deaths of children under the age of five, suicides among adolescents and younger adults and several treatable cancers in younger adults.
The austerity programme helped French and German banks avoid losses on their loans but at the expense of a rising Greek death rate. It resulted in 50% less public hospital funding in 2015 than 2009, hospitals being left without basic supplies, the long-term unemployed stripped of their health insurance and those on low pay finding drugs more expensive because of a 20% cut in the minimum wage. The number of individuals with unmet healthcare needs has nearly doubled since 2010, with a considerable fraction reporting cost as the main reason for not receiving the recommended healthcare services. Greece is not short of healthcare expertise. It has the second highest number of doctors per 1,000 people in the EU but that medical workforce has been forced to watch impotently as the health system has descended into chaos and people have died when they could have been saved.
The evidence from the report in the Lancet could hardly be clearer. Austerity kills.
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