In the United States we are having a very long, very heated and very important political debate over ensuring that every citizen has access to health care. Imagine what it would be like to live in a country where the government spends a total of $61 per citizen per year on health care. No, that’s in Thailand, not Myanmar.

In Myanmar the generals spend $0.40, that’s 40 cents, per citizen per year.

From Burma Journal:

doctors, too, must take on aliases and watch their step when they decide to forgo state-sanctioned employment and help fellow Burmese on their own.

KK, we’ll call him, looks too fresh-faced to be a doctor — less “Grey’s Anatomy” and more “Doogie Howser.” But he graduated from Rangoon medical school after the requisite six years of education and now works underground, crisscrossing the country on his motorbike and helping to train local health workers in remote parts of the country. His work is partially funded by a Western organization, but he is, for the most part, a staff of one.

When we meet, it is at a remote table in a largely empty restaurant. Despite the apparent privacy, KK speaks in hushed tones when explaining that his organization sends pharmaceuticals to the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. for testing, because most of the drugs in Burma come from China and the Burmese government does not control their quality. Complicating matters even more, antibiotics are available readily, without prescriptions, throughout the country; as KK explains, to self-prescribe medication without understanding one’s ailments, especially when using low-quality drugs, creates an iffy proposition.

And here we worry about drugs from Canada?

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