Public Health (Socialism) for Africa

Review of Meredeth Turshen's Privatizing Health Services in Africa. (See chapters available online here)

In researching alternative perspectives I found this book, with some chapters online at the link. Interesting that the author claims the victory of Monetarism over Keynesianism is somehow the reason for loss of faith in government-run public health and other services. Probably the fall of communism and collapse of socialism in England, plus the relatively poor results from decades of foreign-aid funded health services are more the reason.

(International agencies and the Federal Reserve System in the U.S. are full of Monetarist economists in part because through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s these economists could not get jobs in left-wing Keynesian university economics departments. Rutgers, where the author teaches, forced its few free-market economists out in the 1970s, and, being Austrian rather than Monetarists, they formed the early core of the then-unknown but now highly-regarded George Mason University economics department.)

The author faults governments in Eastern Europe for "abdicating decades-old commitments to public housing, public education, and public health." (page 1). Of course for Eastern Europeans these socialist "commitments" came at high cost and with considerable baggage (communism!), not to mention poverty. Eastern European countries, apparently not having learned the lesson about socialism in general, still provide government-funded education and health care (though informal private payments improve speed and quality of service).

In any case it is worth reading at least the first chapters of this book to gain a glimpse of the mind-set of a past generation of scholars whose socialist ideas so long inspired international aid agencies and governments in Africa. And for a market-perspective on this sad history see William Easterly's recent book White Man's Burden and Robert Guest's Shackled Continent (both due out soon in inexpensive paperback editions).