 At some point when you're thinking about healthcare systems around the world, you have to ask yourself the question, what's wrong? Why are these healthcare systems having such a hard time keeping people healthy? Why has it worked that way? If you take a look at a lot of the literature, it's sort of divided up in sort of the way that illness progresses itself because healthcare systems in a lot of ways are sort of a reflection of the illnesses that they're actually trying to solve. And the systems that they are a part of. So if you take a look, you've got causes, and then you've got illnesses, and then you have treatment. Or treatments, we'll make a plur out of it. And if you take kind of the economist look at this, if you think of this as a way of an economist would, they take a look at causes and they say, okay, well, especially in poor countries, the causes are pretty simple to solve. There's just a few things that are sort of causing the mass amount of illness in a society, and they really are pretty inexpensive to solve. And then you've got the illnesses themselves, which cost a little bit more because when people get sick, they can't work and it reduces productivity and does all these things that we've talked about in other lessons. And then we get over to the treatment side, which is where things get really expensive because to treat an illness, you first have to understand it, you have to study it, you have to know how it works, you have to diagnose it at the hospital. So there's all these things that go into treatment that are very expensive. And when you think about treatment, it's a huge, huge thing. It's more than just the medicine that you buy. It's all the things behind that. And then it gets kind of to the reality of the situation when you think about this then, like, okay, well, countries really only have or societies or people in a society only have a certain amount of money. Unfortunately, folks, money is limited. And so you can't put money everywhere. And a lot of times the people in a country or in a health and ministry or in a society or in a community will look at the people in their society and say, wow, we have all these illnesses, we better invest in the treatment because we want to alleviate this pain. And that makes sense in a way. If you think about it on a human level, you see these people being sick and you want to treat them immediately. But as an economist, you might look at this and say, wow, okay, well, here, we're paying, we're doing all this treatment, but it's costing us per person, per disease, say, $3. So we have this disease that costs $3 to treat. Well, what if we were to take a look at the causes? Maybe there's a core, part is a core cause of this illness, of this illness that we're trying to solve that actually only cost $1 to treat. So in a way, you're cutting off two of these dollars here by cutting off the cause, cutting off the illness at the cause and saying, okay, instead of working on treatments, we're going to work on the causes. And we're not going to do it at the detriment of treatment. We're going to make sure that people still are treated when they're ill, but we want to move more money towards reducing causes, which in effect will cut down on treatments. And this makes a lot more sense economically, but it's not necessarily the thing that a lot of countries and organizations and societies are doing, unfortunately. And I think it's especially more efficient if you really kind of think about it in another, you know, we continue this sort of thought experiment. And you say, okay, so every society maybe has like 10 things that are causing a lot of illness in their society or a great deal of illness in their society. So maybe we'll just take one of them right here. We'll maybe imagine that this is poor water sanitation or something like that. It doesn't have to, it can be anything you want. It can be maybe that people are eating too much or too little or whatever. But each society has these causes. And each one of these causes then balloons out into a whole set of illnesses. Because maybe, for example, if we were to use the bad water example, it doesn't just cause, you know, waterborne diseases, but it causes all sorts of other things that spread out. And then each one of those has its own treatment or maybe set of treatments. And sometimes they might overlap. So some things might share a treatment. Some things might not. Some might have three or four treatments. All of these things are expensive. They cost money to research. They cost money to implement. And so as you move across this scale, as you move from causes over through illnesses to treatments, things get more complicated and more expensive. And this investment in preventing the causes of illness is really what's missing. And if we take this a little bit further, we can kind of make a quick list of shortcomings. So things that organizations, countries, societies, are maybe not putting enough thought into or the problems that are cropping up in healthcare systems across the world. Number one is a lack of preventative care. And so this gets at what we were just talking about in the last slide, which is that if you don't put money into solving and heading off problems before they start, you end up paying for them down the road. Much of this comes from insufficient funding. So countries or organizations or societies don't have enough money to even pay for the preventative care or for the treatment or for a lot of things. So insufficient funding is a huge problem because you might have a universal health declaration in your society and say, we're going to make everybody healthy. But if you don't have the money to do that, then it's not really worth anything. So insufficient funding is a huge problem. This can often lead to poor access. So this means that poor access means that you don't have maybe enough places to administer care. So you don't have enough healthcare clinics or you don't have enough doctors or nurses or somehow people are not able to get the care either because it's not being provided or because those people can't access it for some other reason. So that's a big, big thing. Not having enough health education in the society can also be a big problem. So if you're talking to a group of people and trying to tell them, you know, how to become healthier people but they don't know what you're talking about because they don't have the education to understand that, well then you have a huge problem where you have a society that's decided to try to make itself healthier but doesn't necessarily have the means to do it. So poor health education is a major problem. Gaps and information are also a huge thing. Many countries don't have the resources to do all the research or to go out and find out about the things that are happening in their countries. So they don't kind of have a complete image of what they're trying to solve and therefore make mistakes. So information gaps are a big problem. In some countries, corruption is a big problem and this also kind of is tied a little bit into inefficiency, care, inefficiency. And so if you have a corrupt or inefficient system, you have people in these organizations also in the hospitals or in the policymaking positions in a government's healthcare organizations and somewhere things are not being completed so there's not enough work being done or there's money that's being handed over to the wrong people or maybe everybody's doing a really good job but they're just not the structure of the organization is not very good and creates inefficiencies. So that's another problem. It kind of ties into insufficient funding a little bit in a way. And then you have the kind of my last point which I think is maybe one of the most important ones which is the nature of the healthcare market. And I'm going to put market in quotation marks because in a lot of ways, I would almost call the market a little bit of a monopoly. So unless you live in a city that has lots of hospitals, you don't necessarily have a lot of options when it comes to healthcare and so you might only have one hospital that sets one price for healthcare of some kind and you have only the option of going there and only the option of getting that care from that person or those people and paying there. When you have more than one option then there's a little bit of competition but healthcare systems are often monopolies which leads to higher prices and problems in access and things like that. So the nature of the healthcare market in many countries is a problem in and of itself. So that kind of gives you an idea of the shortcomings and up I see that I was missing an S there, the shortcomings of healthcare around the world. You can check out more lessons about healthcare at alversity.org.