WHEN HEALTH IS AFFECTED BY CORRUPTION
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Authors:
• Adrian Ducu MATEI, email: ducumatei@yahoo.com, Afiliation: „Athenaeum” University of BucharestPages:
• 165|178 -
Keywords: health, freedom, development, confidence, economic crisis, corruption
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Abstract:
This paper emphasizes the most important features of corruption acting as a disease, its interaction with the official economy, the way this complex and multistructural phenomenon develops, as well as the consequences of ignoring this harmful phenomenon. In fact, considering the way things happen, there is an aggressive act on the state and the honest citizen; thus nowadays there is a deeper inequity in terms of income and living conditions. Ignoring such a phenomenon leads to a deeper inequity, which seems to be one of the most current and disturbing issues with consequences on the social development.
The gap between incomes grows bigger every year, according to statistics, in almost all the countries in the world, but mostly in the former communist countries; there are some very rich person as opposed to most of the citizens with lower income; it is one of the reasons why people are unhappy and accordingly they become distrustful, selfish, greedy and social chaos appears. The way chosen to control this inequity makes people feel nostalgia for the past times, like the communist system that seemed to be able to control the situation; in fact it is proved to have failed. One of the systems proving these inequities is the health system, where citizens interact with the state, and where the poor cannot benefit from basic proper health assistance, whereas the rich get special, different treatment; this causes increased social tensions. It has been a system with continuous increasing funding but at the same time it has failed to deal with the health of the population; various failures occur all the time, some are very serious, and media presents tragic cases that have not been solved by the system. It is known that the individual as the bearer of labor services is of particular importance in an economy; the population size at a given time and all the changes depend on key demographic processes (birth and death rates; the development of these elements represents the natural increase of population) under social and economic factors, such as life span and life expectancy, overall health, living standards, networking and spending on education and expenditures on health preservation.
The serious phenomenon of corruption tends to become visible everywhere, in every circumstance and it is perceived as becoming an increasing aggression on the citizen; it is a cost that must be permanently considered, which is an additional stress. Eventually the effect translates in amounts that never reach the general consolidated budget or amounts that are ineffectively spent, which spread all over the health system and economy; the major result is that the state loses track of important resources of the budget generating lack of confidence both in the public health system and economy. The consequences are serious and they cannot lead to providing a decent living or promoting a climate of social peace. Permanent limitation of this phenomenon in the health system has a major importance in the economic and social development of the country as the quality of labor is closely interrelated on the one hand with overall health and, on the other hand both with the level of general education and training - an expression of the efforts of the individual, family, businesses and society as a whole.
The general health of the population is affected when corruption affects the health system and the consequences are visible in the economic and social development of the country.