Inequality and the future of healthcare

Abstract

To protect our masses, primary care institutes were developed in many countries, all over the globe. In the previous era, labour was valuable to produce crops and protect native countries from enemies as no substitute for raw labour was available to do these jobs. The scenario has changed after the era of automation. After the agricultural revolution, technological revolution took place. Hence, most of the manual jobs in agriculture sector and industry sector were automated. As a result, “new” type of jobs has emerged which was based, so far, on mainly of cognitive skills, e.g., learning, analysing, communication, and understanding human emotions. As the technology is advancing day by day, the role of humans as individual is becoming less and less except for some extraordinary persons or elite groups. Now the important question is, will elites and governments will go on valuing every human being even when it pays no economic dividends? Will the development of mass medicine/primary care will continue? Will governments/bureaucrats fund adequately for the protection of the health of these useless classes merely on the humanitarian ground? We assume that due to technological advancement and greater role of elite classes, the norm of shifting non-normal people to normality may not require any more, the previous practice of treatment (health for all concept) may not repeat in future and it is quite natural. Experiences from Japan highlight that society may prefer theses elites to the useless average class. The gap between the two classes regarding availing health facilities may widen further. This is because the government may focus more on the health of elites than common masses. One step further the government/ bureaucrat may try for immortality/divinity for this elite class, at any cost for maintaining supremacy over the poor masses.

Keywords

• inequality
• inequity
• mass medicine
• public health
• primary care