Warning to Abbott - Health Cuts Cost Lives

Austerity can be bad for your health. Greece has seen drastic increases in infant mortality, suicide and depression since the government made deep cuts to healthcare and social support services between 2009 and 2012. These fallouts may soon be reprised in other countries that have embarked on tough austerity measures, such as Spain and Portugal.

Following the country's financial crash, Greece cut its hospital budget by 25 per cent cut and slashed funding for mental health problems by 55 per cent. An analysis of health statistics shows that as a result, suicides increased 45 per cent between 2007 and 2011 and, over roughly the same period, cases of depression more than doubled and infant mortality rose by 43 per cent.

Needle-exchange schemes and free condoms for injecting drug users were also cut. By 2012, new HIV cases in this group were 32 times what they had been in 2009. The country has also had its first cases of locally spread malaria for 40 years.

"The Greek experience shows the serious consequences of withdrawing health spending and social services," says David Stuckler of the University of Oxford, lead author of the analysis.

Spain next?

The worry is that a similar pattern will be seen in Spain, which introduced similarly savage cuts to health budgets in 2012 and 2013. "We think Spain will follow if the cuts are not reversed," says Helena Legido-Quigley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who last year published a study on how the recession has so far affected health in Spain.

Legido-Quigley says that more recent developments such as the withdrawal of universal access to healthcare from 873,000 non-residents in 2012 could create conditions for epidemics of HIV and TB like those seen when services were withdrawn in Greece. She says there's still time to prevent similar epidemics in Spain, but only by restoring universal healthcare.

False economy

Stuckler says preventing epidemics is far cheaper than controlling them once they've begun. Last year, he produced estimates suggesting that healthcare spending actually boosts the economy, adding more than $4 to the economy for every $1 invested, compared with a drain on the economy of $10 for every $1 invested in defence, for example.

It's a false economy to cut spending on health and welfare, says Stuckler, and both Iceland and Finland survived economic meltdowns without doing so. Instead, they saved public money by not bailing out failed banks, leaving the private sector to pick up the bill.

"Short-term savings gained by drastic austerity measures should be weighed against their long-term costs," says George Slavich of the University of California, Los Angeles, who investigates the long-term effects of stress. "Living in a state of social and economic unpredictability, with inadequate access to healthcare, does not just contribute to short-term illness, it can also set in motion a set of biological processes that greatly affect lifelong health, and which can even lead to premature death," he says.