Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and co-founder of Microsoft (MSFT), is concerned about the global trend of declining healthcare expenditures by governments and businesses.
Gates stated on Monday in an exclusive Yahoo Finance Live interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, “I’m a little concerned.” “The world’s dealing with a lot of challenges right now, and the fact that we still have 5 million children dying before the age of five — it isn’t as visual, it’s not like a plane crashing or a bomb hitting a building — and yet, these deaths one by one add up to that 5 million.”
The Gates Foundation should not be categorized as a proponent of reducing healthcare expenditures.
On the exact contrary.
For the year 2024, the Gates Foundation disclosed its most substantial annual budget to date, amounting to $8.6 billion, today. The budget represents a 4% increase compared to the previous year and a $2 billion improvement over expenditures in 2021.
Additionally, the foundation reaffirmed its determination to augment its yearly expenditures to $9 billion by the year 2026.
The foundation has prioritized “reducing health inequities by funding the development of new tools and strategies to reduce the burden of infectious diseases and the leading causes of child mortality in low-income countries,” according to its website.
The Gates Foundation estimates that child mortality has decreased globally from over 9.3 million annually in 2000 to 4.6 million annually by 2022, according to its research.
In contrast, malaria and HIV-related fatalities have been reduced by half over the last two decades. The Gates Foundation reports that wild polio, which previously paralyzed 350,000 children annually, has been reduced to 12 cases in two countries.
With the advent of the pandemic in recent years, however, Gates stated, “Our progress [on healthcare] has reached a plateau.”
