Keynote Speech by WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at the Global Economic Summit

Killarney, Ireland

One of the ultimate goals of economic development is to ensure health and wellbeing for all.

Health and well-being are not created primarily in hospitals and clinics, but in the way we eat, live, learn and work.

That means health is the business of every sector – not just the health sector.

When people do get sick, they must be able to access the health services they need, without financial hardship.

And yet globally, 4.5 billion people lack access to essential health services.

And 2 billion people experience financial hardship paying for care out of their own pockets.

At the United Nations General Assembly last year, world leaders committed to closing these gaps and accelerating progress towards Universal Health Coverage by 2030.

Achieving that aim will require strengthening public financing to reorient health systems towards a primary health care approach, focused on keeping people healthy and preventing disease.

Such an approach helps to avoid or delay the need for more costly secondary or tertiary care, which means governments can make limited resources stretch further, and reach more people.

It’s also the eyes and ears of the health system, detecting and responding to outbreaks at the earliest opportunity and helping to prevent pandemics and their economic impacts.

All of this means that health spending is not a cost to be contained, but an investment in social and economic security, stability and development.

Health is fundamentally a political choice – a choice that is made in laws, regulations and policies, but also in budgets, and decisions about how economies are structured.

In its report last year, the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All proposed concrete, evidence-based recommendations on how to rethink, reframe and restructure economies to deliver healthier populations.

I commend the report to you.

In the end, the question is not whether the countries can afford to invest in the health of their populations – it’s whether they can afford not to.

I thank you.