Capitalism strikes again. The target this time, after hunger and education, is health. What ordinary people look for in an economic system is not the mere theories which substantiate the system and its foundation.

Ordinary people at the end of the day want to be healthy with enough food on the table and a sense of security when they go to bed. A successful system is the one that removes from the people the fear of losing their ability to function due to epidemic diseases or losing their lives altogether.

Despite the extraordinary growth in wealth and resources under capitalism, health insecurity continues to haunt individuals and nations across the globe. In America, the wealthiest capitalist nation in the world, health crisis continues to escalate over the years. Health crisis has become a permanent subject of debate during election times in the USA. It is estimated that a man during his lifetime has a chance of 44% to have one form of a cancer disease68. This rate is not slowing down; on the contrary, it has increased dramatically during the past few years. In other words, the tremendous growth in wealth and advancement in technology is not helping in fighting an enemy from within. Heart-related problems consume more than seven hundred thousands lives a year. According to the American Heart Association, 831,272 lives vanished due to heart related diseases in 2006. Such high rate of fatal diseases is not accidental. This is a direct by-product of systems which control wealth distribution and resource allocation. To see this imbalance of resource allocation, just look at one of the annual budgets and see how the resources are allocated. The curves in figure 16 show a breakdown of the discretionary budgets (budget subject to approval by Congress and the president) for the past seven years in the United States (69, 70). The United States spends on military more than 50% of its budget every year, whereas it spends less than 14% on the education and health needs. In the meantime, it is a well-known fact that epidemic diseases such as cancer, heart problems, diabetes, and others consume much more lives than all those who die in direct wars or indirect wars of terrorism.

Peter Jennings, the late ABC anchor, concludes in a documentary called “Breakdown—America’s Health Insurance Crisis,” that spiraling costs and the growing number of uninsured are all part of a health insurance system in a state of crisis71. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, nearly fifty-four million Americans under age sixty-five, or 18% of the population under the age sixty-five, were without health insurance in 200772. The current economic downturn will contribute seven more million to the army of uninsured Americans73; by 2010 there will be more than sixty million people without health insurance. The largest group of uninsured people belongs to the poorest segment of the population; 32% of the total number of people without insurance (fifteen million) is Hispanics.

The main reason for the increased number of uninsured people is poverty, which is reflected in the increased cost of health insurance and related premium compared to the wages and income of people. Even if employees are offered coverage on the job, they can’t always afford their portion of the premium.

Health insurance premiums have increased 119%for employees between 1999 and 200974, that is, three times more than the average increase in employee wages. The average wages increased only 35% between 1999 and 2008; see figure 17. Small firms refrain from offering health insurance due to rising health insurance premiums.

It is estimated that twenty-two thousand people die every year because they are unable to access reasonable health care resources. People without proper insurance receive less preventive care; they are diagnosed at more advanced stages of diseases and receive less therapeutic care. This leads to high mortality rates among uninsured individuals.

As in the case of education, lack of proper health care deepens poverty, and poverty dramatically reduces health care for individuals. In order to break this cycle, more needs to be done than simply increasing the supply of drugs, health equipment, and hospital beds. It is the mechanism for distributing these resources that enables individuals to receive the proper health care. The high cost of health care destroys the economic well-being of families. Medical bills have a major financial impact on 30% of low-income families without health coverage75, pushing them into debt.

The disparity between those who have insurance and those who do not is growing more and more. As a result, the health divide has been widened in access to usual source of care, annual physical checkup, and preventive care.

Profits at ten of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428% from 2000 to 2007, while consumers paid more for less coverage. In 2008, the total profit of five insurance companies topped $7.8 billion.

HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis continue to be the most serious threat to the life of millions of people in the developing countries. The health care systems in developing countries have deteriorated to extreme levels such that these and other diseases have become so epidemic.

According to published data by UNAIDS/World Health Organization, the number of people diagnosed with AIDS in 2007 was more than 33 million people. More than 2 million of them died in the year 2007. More than 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981. The majority of the AIDS victims are in the poorest part of the world in sub-Saharan Africa, where 22 million people live with the disease and 1.5 million have vanished as a result.

The epidemic of AIDS is growing worldwide despite the tremendous growth in wealth and health care facilities. Figure 18 shows the global trend in the AIDS epidemic. In some African countries, one out of three people carry the AIDS/HIV virus. More than 40% of the world population living in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Russia, China, and India face serious health risks due to spread of AIDS. Nigeria is projected to have 10-15 million cases by 2010, and Ethiopia 7-10 million. In both countries, the situation is likely to be aggravated by a lack of public health infrastructure due to extreme poverty. The AIDS population is expected to reach 10-15 million by 2010 in China and 20-25 million in India.

The main challenge for AIDS treatment in developing countries is the high cost of the treatment which amounts to $10,000-$15,000 per person per year. This high cost is barely affordable in highly developed nations; this is certainly the main barrier which prevents patients in the developing world from getting the proper treatment. Given the high poverty rates among the population of AIDS, it is difficult to see a break point in this catastrophic disease. Given the high poverty rate, a large percentage of the African nations will continue to face serious threats from AIDS. Unless the epidemic of poverty is resolved, the hope out of AIDS remains slim.

Poverty is also responsible for the majority of AIDS cases in the United States. Forty-nine percent of the total AIDS cases in the United States belong to the black population, which makes less than 15% of the total country’s population. It is estimated that 22% of the African Americans with HIV do not have health insurance76.

Tuberculosis (TB) is in a similar league as AIDS. One-third of the world’s population is infected with TB. In 2002, there were 8.8 million new cases, and around 2 million deaths from TB. Asia and sub-Saharan Africa account for more than 84% (7.4 millions) of the new TB cases.

In the USA, the number of active tuberculosis cases began to rise in 1985 after it had declined continuously since the 1950s. Several factors were behind the return of tuberculosis, including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, increased poverty, IV drug use, and homelessness. It is worth noting that the Reagan administration cut 7 billion dollars from the food stamp program in 1981. Immediately after this cut, hunger-related problems such as anemia, tuberculosis, poor growth, and osteoporosis crawled back.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 14,093 cases of active tuberculosis (TB) in the United States in 2005, and 10 to 15 million people with latent tuberculosis. Thirty percent of those with latent TB infection will progress into active tuberculosis if they have diabetes, and almost all with HIV infection will progress into active TB. As in the case of AIDS, tuberculosis in the United States is highest among the poor population of the Hispanics (8.5 cases per 100,000) and the blacks (9.4 per 100,000) compared to whites (1.1 cases per 100,000).

There are cures, yet only around 37% of TB cases receive proper treatment due to a lack of resources and unreliable supplies of quality drugs. As a result, multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) incidence is surging, with three hundred thousand new cases each year. MDR-TB is a hundred times more expensive to treat than normal TB. One more time, poverty and unbalanced distribution of resources is responsible for another disease of epidemic proportions. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 36 million people will die of tuberculosis by 2020 if it is not controlled79. Figure 19 shows that TB cases continue to be on the rise; it is not slowing down.

Another major killer is malaria, and as with TB, drug resistance is a growing problem. WHO estimates that each year there are 300-500 million cases, with 1-3 million deaths—mostly children. The social and economic burden of such infection is catastrophic. Malaria continues to undercut sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP per capita growth rates by some 1.3 percentage points per year.

Besides these main killers, there are many other diseases that continue to consume millions of human lives every year. Poverty, hunger, poor access to clean water, inadequate sanitation and malnutrition, AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria are depriving us of several million lives, the majority of whom are children.

Disease and poverty under the dominance of capitalism are winning the war against human life. Without proper education, food security, and healthy workforce, the world has little hope of sustained economic and social development. Sick and hungry children cannot afford to attend school and, if they do, will not be able to learn well. The end result is large pools of poorly educated, unemployed, and alienated young people. This is a recipe for political instability, social incohesion, and a suitable climate for failure.

The irony is that world organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and others continue to emphasize the necessity to increase the production of drugs and health care resources. What should be emphasized is the fact that the cost of treatment of any of the epidemic diseases ($15,000 per year for AIDS victims) is way beyond what many of the AIDS patients in the world can afford. What the world needs is not more of the same: increased production and resources; the world really needs a new economic infrastructure with a more just mechanism for resource distribution, a system that enables the hungry to access food resources and the sick to access drugs and health care facilities, and the illiterate to access education facilities.