Eric Bing: A New Global Health Model: Scale Down to Help More

About 40 children under the age of five die every three minutes, 40% of whom are less than a month old. In the same time frame two women die in child birth. These are startling statistics, but in fact, they have fallen by 35% over the past 20 years. Over the same period malaria deaths have dropped by 50% in eight African countries. And many more could be saved by simple things such as providing prenatal and postnatal care, educating mothers on the importance of clean drinking water and through vaccinations. If these solutions are so simple why are they not being implemented? Dr. Eric Bing has a solution: scale down the healthcare system to help more people. By encouraging people's natural entrepreneurial spirit and training them to open micro-clinics and micro-pharmacies in the hard to reach and most affected areas, these important health education services, medications and treatments can be made available to the most vulnerable at a fraction of the cost of current aid packages. With new technology and a scaled-down bottom-up healthcare strategy, Bing argues we can make these startling statistics a thing of the past.

Speaker: Eric Bing, Senior Fellow and Director of Global Health, George W. Bush Institute

Moderator: Stephen Kahn, President, Abundance Foundation