Speech delivered at the Medicus Mundi Switzerland Symposium on Equity in Health. Basel, Switzerland 6th of November 2019
The SDG 3, “Ensuring a healthy life and promoting well-being for all at all ages” implicitly includes equity in health. The Agenda 2030 engages and commits all governments to adopt “indivisible” and universal goals toward ending poverty by 2030 “once and for all”. The new agenda is not without contradictions. Among other things, it proposes among its economic objectives “sustainable, inclusive and sustained growth” which is, in fact, an oxymoron due to the known “limits of growth” in a finite ecosystem. Thus, the challenge of sustainability is global and involves all national health systems. Chiefly looking at Universal Health Coverage (UHC), the main driver of the SDG 3, and equity as an indicator, the presentation will argue that the SDG 3’s feasibility and sustainability is highly dependent on structural societal determinants which, if left unchallenged by appropriate global governance processes, may jeopardise its attainment. To ensure the effective sustainability of SDG 3 in general, and of UHC in particular, the presentation advocates an urgent paradigmatic shift in the approach to development.
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