European governments should not cut healthcare spending during the current economic crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and associated lockdowns, the World Health Organization warned on Thursday. "We are concerned that countries will respond to this crisis in the same way they did to the recession 10 years ago...
by cutting public spending on health," WHO regional director for Europe, Hans Kluge, told a press conference. "Those cuts prevented many people from accessing the healthcare that they needed." According to WHO Europe, public spending on healthcare per capita fell in about half of European countries between 2008 and 2013.