The Price of Being Poor Can Be Getting Sick
We usually think of poverty causing poor health.
But what if poor health can also cause poverty?
The relationship runs in both directions.
The World Health Organization’s 2026 global health statistics report says progress towards universal health coverage has slowed sharply. The global UHC service coverage index rose only from 68 to 71 between 2015 and 2023, while one quarter of the world’s population faced financial hardship from health costs.
More strikingly, WHO reports that 1.6 billion people were living in or pushed into poverty because of out-of-pocket health spending in 2022.
That changes the way we should think about healthcare.
A healthcare system isn’t merely a service people use when something goes wrong. It is part of a country’s economic infrastructure.
Imagine two workers with identical skills.
One becomes seriously ill and has access to affordable treatment.
The other becomes seriously ill, cannot afford treatment, misses work, loses income and takes on debt.
The illness may be medically identical.
The economic consequences are not.
Now add children, housing costs and insecure employment to the second household and the problem becomes even larger.
This is why health inequality cannot be separated neatly from economic inequality.
And it creates an interesting policy question: should healthcare be treated primarily as a cost to government, or as an investment in the productive capacity of society?
The second view changes the calculation.
Preventive care can reduce later costs. Accessible primary care can help people remain in work. Vaccination can prevent disruption. Mental health support can affect employment and education. Reliable health systems can make societies more resilient when emergencies arrive.
None of this means every health service is automatically efficient or every public programme is well designed.
It means the argument should be broader than “How much does healthcare cost?”
We should also ask: “What does poor healthcare cost us?”
That cost can appear in hospital bills, lost working days, lower educational outcomes, family debt and people leaving the workforce.
WHO’s new health inequality tools are designed to make these differences more visible by allowing countries to examine health outcomes across factors such as age, sex, economic status, education and place of residence.
Better measurement won’t solve inequality.
But it can make inequality harder to ignore.
This is the kind of systems thinking I explore in How We Can Fix Things: Unlocking Solutions for a Better World. A problem that looks like healthcare may actually be a problem involving wages, education, housing, taxation, geography and social protection.
If getting sick can push a person into poverty, should access to healthcare be considered an economic right as well as a health policy issue?
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