Assessment and implementation of health care priorities in developing countries; Incompatible paradigms and competing social systems

This paper addresses conceptual issues underlying the assessment and implementation of health care priorities in developing countries as practised by foreign development agencies coping with a potentially destabilizing unmet social demand. As such, these agencies mediate the gap between existing health care structures patterned around the narrow needs of the ruling classes and the magnitude of public ill-health mass movements thrive to eradicate with implications for capitalism at large. It is in this context that foreign agencies are shown to intervene for the re-assessment and implementation of health care priorities in developing countries with the objective of defending capitalism against the delegitimizing effects of its own development, specifically the persistence of mass disease. Constrained by this objective, the interpretations they offer of the miserable state of health prevailing in developing countries and how it could be improved remains ideological: it ranges between 'stage theory' and modern consumption-production Malthusianism. 1. (a) Developing countries are entering into a new pattern of public health which derives from their unique location in the development of capitalism, more specifically in the new international division of labor. Their present position affects not only the pattern and magnitude of disease formation but also the effective alleviation of mass disease without an alteration in the mode of production itself. 2. (b) In the context of under-development, increased productivity is at the necessary cost of public health. Orienting health care priorities in line with belief in the instrumentality of profit for eradicating the diseases of under-development is ideological and counterproductive. Public health improvement is basically incompatible with production-consumption Malthusianism from which the leading 'Basic Needs' orientation in the assessment and implementation of health care priorities derives. Marx said that "Countries of developing capitalism suffer not only from its development but also from its under-development". Rephrasing Marx, this paper points out that developing countries suffer not only from the under-development of capitalism but also from its development.