"Corruption Kills," So Why Is Health Care Corruption Ignored?

An article published last month by PLoS One(1) emphasizes the stark contrast between the likely impact on health of corruption, including health care corruption, and the attention paid to it. 

The Methodologic Details

The authors performed an ecological, country-level analysis to assess the association of perceived national corruption level (measured by Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index [CPI] using 2008 data) and national mortality rates for children under five years old, controlling for the best known measurable predictors of such mortality.   Their final model included the following other predictors: GDP per capita, people with access to improved water source, people with access to improved sanitation, percentage of rural population, literacy rate, dependency ratio, population density, total health expenditure per capita, health expenditure as percentage of GDP, DTP vaccine coverage, measles vaccine coverage, food supply, presence of equatorial, arid, warm temperate and snow climate on national territory, civil liberties, political rights, national battle-related deaths.  The final model had a pseudo R squared = 0.89, and the addition of CPI to the model increased it by 1.61%.

The Results and Implications

The results were that corruption explained approximately 1.61% of the variance of country-level child mortality.  This suggested the hypothesis that:

roughly 1.6% of world deaths in children could be explained by corruption meaning that, of the annual 8.795 million children deaths, more than 140000 annual children deaths could be indirectly attributed to corruption.

The authors emphasized that this was only a hypothesis, and that ecological models are prone to bias. In particular, I would point out that such models can omit variables that are associated with the included variables, but are better predictors, or even true causes of the outcome. Nonetheless, as the authors pointed out, "all the data used in this analysis is the only available to study the problem at this scale."

Another problem is that the analysis could not distinguish the effects of health care corruption from those of other kinds of corruption. In the introduction, the authors emphasized what has been written about the importance of health care corruption as having "pejorative health consequences." However, general corruption could also affect health. The authors gave the example of how corruption could affect access to uncontaminated water.

Nonetheless, the analysis appears highly plausible, and may be the best possible given the available data. It suggests, as the authors noted, that corruption could causes deaths "that largely exceeds the conspicuous pooled total of cholera, rabies, Ebola, and combat-related deaths."

This suggests the big paradox. As the authors put it,

because the equation corruption = deaths is seldom explicit, corruption only seems like a nuisance.

As we have said, most recently here, most of the organizations one might have expected would have provided some response to health care corruption instead have largely treated it as at best a nuisance. Specifically, there is almost no teaching or research on corruption in health care academics (including medical and public health schools, and programs in health care research and policy.)  There is almost no mention of corruption by health care professional associations.  There are almost no initiatives to fight corruption on the part of health care charities and donors.  There is almost no interest in corruption among patient advocacy organizations.  (See previous discussion here.)

Because there is so little interest in and attention to corruption, and particularly health care corruption, there has been little research on it, and therefore the best available estimate of the effect of corruption on health may now be the study by Hanf et al. 

I also postulated that at least in the US context, this lack of interest in corruption may partially be explained by these organizations' institutional conflicts of interest and the individual conflicts of interest affecting their leaders.  It may be further explained by the exposure of some leaders to the irresponsible, if not amoral culture that now currently pervades finance, which may have in turn been one cause of the great recession, or global financial collapse. 

Hanf and collaborators concluded,

The global response to child deaths must involve a necessary increase in funds available to 1) develop water and sanitation access and 2) purchase new methods for prevention, management, and treatment of major diseases killing children around the globe (principally pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria). However, without paying attention to the anti-corruption mechanisms needed to ensure their proper use, it will also provide further opportunity for corruption. In practice, donors and governments still treat health, water/sanitation access and corruption as separate rather than integral components of the same strategy. To address these obstacles, designing dedicated indicators at micro and macro levels which monitor efficiently corruption impacts on health and heath related services, is urgently needed. Policies and interventions supported by governments and donors must integrate initiatives that recognise how health and corruption are inter-related.

I wonder if the realization that corruption, including health care corruption may be leading to the deaths of children will be enough for academic health care institutions, professional societies, health care charities and donors, and patient advocacy groups to develop "initiatives that recognise how health and corruption are inter-related"?

Reference

1.  Hanf M, Van-Melle A, Fraisse F et al. Corruption kills: estimating the global impact of corruption on children deaths.  PLos ONE 2011; 6: e26990. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026990.  Link here.