One of the World Association Boards that calls for prompt realization deals with health services. Here the inadequacies of both rich and poor countries are great. What could readily become a world-wide service system is in fact a fantastically skewed and peculiar set of services. The poor are kept from dying epidemically in order to live listlessly ill. The well-to-do and the medical practitioners combine to promote expensive services at high-income points, cutting out ordinary citizen. even where medical and health portions of the GNP rise to the cheers of the growth fetishists.
Ordinary medical and public health services, of the kind that 90 per cent of the world's poor, and rich need throughout life, require a corps of professional and pare-professional workers twenty times the present number, ordinarily trained in one-fourth the time, and facilities ten times the present number. These can be supplied at a cost not much different than the total now spent upon all medical and health services in the world.