Governments around the world spend too much money on treating illnesses and diseases and not enough on health education and prevention. Do you agree or disagree with this statement?

I very much agree with the statement that governments are not spending their health budgets in the best possible way. If governments continue to spend such large sums of money on treating illness and disease instead of preventing these diseases, then perhaps they should rename our national health services ‘national illness services’! Governments will probably argue that it is necessary to spend a large proportion of health budgets on treating illness because the general population do not live healthy lifestyles and so become ill. They would argue that most people do not listen to health campaigns. Also, they would say it is not possible to prevent many illnesses and diseases such as flu and many types of cancer, as well as accidents and emergencies. The problem with this argument is that it is very negative because it assumes that people are stupid and refuse to lead healthy lives. However, when people have the right information, they often do the right thing – in my country than in the past. I believe that the main reason for this is government health campaigns, including very strong health warnings on the products. In my opinion, governments can do a lot to prevent not only illnesses and disease, but also accidents. Why don’t governments spend more money on installing speed cameras on roads to make people drive more slowly? That would reduce the number of accidents. To summarise, I really think that there is a lot that governments can do to prevent illness and disease to make the world a healthier place to live. In particular, rich governments can spend more money on scientific research to find the causes of new diseases such as AIDS, while governments from less well-developed countries can spend money on providing clean water for all their people. In this way, the world will have less need for expensive cures and hospitals.