Proper tax should pay for health care, says Bill Gates

Co-chair of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, says funds for basic health care should come from the government using appropriate tax system. In a teleconference with Daily Trust, ahead of the release of the Gates Annual Letter, Microsoft founder Gates said high net worth individuals and organisations have been helping states maintain some […]

Co-chair of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, says funds for basic health care should come from the government using appropriate tax system.

In a teleconference with Daily Trust, ahead of the release of the Gates Annual Letter, Microsoft founder Gates said high net worth individuals and organisations have been helping states maintain some funding for health care.

The Gates Foundation and Aliko Dangote Foundation helped states like Kano, Kaduna and Borno get cold-chain equipment for vaccine and rebuild clinics destroyed in the Boko Haram insurgency.

Speaking about private sector involvement in health care financing, Gates said, “What’s going on is good, but we could see even more.”

“Fundamentally funding for basic health care should come through the tax system,” Gates told Daily Trust.

“Nigeria actually has  more money than most other African countries. But getting it prioritised and then well spent against primary health care [should be crucial].”

“It absolutely can be done, and the community can play a part there, but government can play a role,” he said.

Citing donation from businessman Warren Buffer as the “single biggest gift anyone ever gave anybody for anything”, the Gates in their annual letter highlighted health indices that private-sector finance has helped improve in the last 10 years.

“More children survived in 2015 than in 2014. More survived in 2014 than in 2013, and so on,” said Bill Gates. “If you add it all up, 122 million children under age five have been saved over the past 25 years. These are children who would have died if mortality rates had stayed where they were in 1990.”

Melinda Gates noted coverage for the basic package of childhood vaccines is now the highest it’s ever been, at 86 percent.

“And the gap between the richest and the poorest countries is the lowest it’s ever been. Vaccines are the biggest reason for the drop in childhood deaths,” she said.

The Foundation also raised concern about numbers that demand more work.

Said Bill: “Every year, one million infants die on the day they’re born. A total of nearly 3 million die in their first month of life. As the total number of childhood deaths has dropped, the proportion that are newborn deaths has gone up. Newborn deaths now represent 45 percent of all childhood deaths, up from 40 percent in 1990.”

Melinda Gates noted malnutrition contributed to nearly one in two deaths among children.

But she said with up to 300 million in developing countries now use modern methods of contraception for the first time in history.

“It took decades to reach 200 million women. It has taken only another 13 years to reach 300 million—and the impact in saving lives is fantastic,” she noted.’

Bill Gates ended the letter with the “most magical number we know.”

“It’s zero. This is the number we’re striving toward every day at the foundation. Zero malaria. Zero TB. Zero HIV. Zero malnutrition. Zero preventable deaths. Zero difference between the health of a poor kid and every other kid.”