The Modern Tragedy of Healthcare Inequality Across the Globe

Between 10,000-25,000 children in the U.S. alone suffer from Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA). Source for Photo: Daily Sabah

The New York Times featured a family from India whose daughter has a fatal condition, spinal muscular atrophy. This condition impacts 3200 infants a year in India, and is a genetic disorder with the highest fatality for infants globally. Muscle atrophy can vary in its severity based on its rate of progression, but all forms of this condition are deadly.  Ellen Praveen, a girl younger than two, faces death if a life-saving treatment cannot be given. This cure, that does exist, costs 2.1 million USD, however. 

The Praveens, like other families who have children with this genetic disorder, attempted to secure the treatment through crowdfunding and donations. Unfortunately, unless one is lucky enough to garner attraction for their need, raising such an amount of money seems insurmountable for most families. The NY Times comments that in order to address this issue, “Patient advocacy groups are pushing for government intervention to negotiate better prices with pharmaceutical companies.” This need for government intervention also implies that prices could be cheaper and that the choices of the pharmaceutical companies interfere with saving lives through medicine. The struggles of the Praveens and others display a global issue that treatments are unaffordable to those who need them. 

Rare conditions are not the only illnesses that lack affordable treatments. In the U.S for example, the cost of diabetes medication can be anywhere from the range of four dollars to five hundred dollars without insurance. The price depends on which medicine is used and the number of treatments or medication a patient needs. While insulin is one of the most expensive biosynthetic agents to make, the high costs can be fatal. Persons such as Shayne Patrick Boyle, Jesimya David Scherer-Radcliff, and Alec Raeshawn Smith all passed away because of inaccessibility to insulin. Alec Raeshawn Smith died because he had to ration his insulin. Lawmakers have drafted many bills to try and lower costs of insulin; as of March 2022, the House of Representatives passed a bill to cap the price of insulin at thirty-five dollars a month, but it has not passed in the senate as of yet.

Healthcare inequality happens on a macro and micro level. At a micro level, each nation's people can find commonality in the struggle to secure lifesaving healthcare services, treatments, and medication. People within these nations often cannot access these treatments unless they are affluent. On the macro level, wealthier nations have proportionately better healthcare access than poorer nations.  Latin America for example, has some of the most persistent health inequalities in the world with infant mortalities at vastly different rates within individual countries, such as Panama. But the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how preventive measures such as vaccines also can be inaccessible to some but not for others, both within countries as well as between countries. The poverty gap between nations widens as vaccine equity does, too. Additionally, on a macro level, there are inequalities to access for cardiovascular health care between affluent and impoverished nations.

Just as friends and family members in the U.S may worry about their insulin medication, the price of their epipens, or the trip to the hospital costing over a thousand dollars, people around the globe have concerns about the healthcare they have access to and how to better access it. The struggles of the Praveens at its core is something that a majority of the world’s citizens can understand in some way. Government intervention often seems to be the only solution, as seen in India as well as the U.S, but is also a reflection to how medicine has been grossly privatized to the extent that such large government intervention is needed. Change cannot exist without recognition and rectification. Ellen Praveen’s life can be saved if medicine was more affordable, just as Alec Raeshawn Smith and many others enduring different conditions without affordable treatment could have as well if they had the accessibility. Many strides have been made in the medical field within the last one-hundred, fifty, and even twenty years. Yet, it’s one thing to have medical advancements that cure what was once incurable – but if those who need them most cannot enjoy them, then have we really advanced as far as we think?